 So yeah, I've been really looking forward to this. Laura Vandenberg, I don't really have a formal introduction prepared, but she is the author of four books. This is her fourth book, her second novel. She teaches creative writing at Harvard. She lives in Cambridge. She's from Florida. And she is a writer that is really being talked about a lot these days. She's a writer that we're going to get into the particulars of this book. But my wife and I, since finishing this book, have had great conversations about this book. And that's no surprise. She is a writer who just generates that kind of discussion and involvement. And this book, for those of you who know it, or for those of you who will soon know it, is absolutely absorbing and unnerving and vivid and smart and really unlike a lot of work that's being done today. So I wanted to start our conversation. What I'm hoping for tonight is to really listen to Laura talk. I think that that's why you're all here. And so I'm going to try to find ways to get Laura to talk about the book and about writing in general. And then she's also going to read an excerpt from the book. But I wanted to start by just maybe more specifically describing my reaction to the book, which hopefully will lead to a question that you can answer. But so one of the great accomplishments, I think, that this book, or one of the great accomplishments of this book, is that it describes the state of grief. And particularly that state of peak grieving when the lens through which you see the world makes everything kind of ultra-vivid and hallucinatory and fractured. That state when the world is cracked open because of grief. And I feel like the way that she does that is in the sentences, really, at the sentence level. So there's a lot about the plot that gets us to that place and the ideas in the book. But the image is really for me or what created that feeling that reminded me of moments in my life when I was in that peak grieving state. So this is something I think it's a great achievement of the book, is that these sentences create this feeling of, I'm sure many of you can relate to this, but that feeling of the air being slightly different and things shimmering and feeling as though even mundane things are slightly surreal. So Laura, I think in this book, and I think you'll hear it in the sentences that she reads for us achieves that effect masterfully. So I wanted that is my kind of, that was kind of what I was. I mean, there are many things about this book that I was impressed by, but that was something that I think will really stay with me is the way that you recreated that feeling. So I want to then pivot into asking you, how did this book come to be? And where did this come from? Well, thank you. That was a beautiful introduction. And thank you to the library for having me and all of you for coming on a very, very rainy evening. So the story of how this book came to be is not a short story. And as I've been doing events, I've really tried to condense it. And it's gotten marginally more condensed, but just bear with me. So it's my practice when I'm between projects to keep what I call a thought log, which is exactly what it sounds like. Just a notebook where I sort of record things that I've been thinking about. It's not like a journal. My feelings stay largely out of it. But just stuff that where I'm like, this is interesting. I think that there might be something here in terms of fiction. And there are a couple of things that kept coming up, horror movies, marriage, ailing elderly parents. And also travel, both in the context of travel for pleasure, professional travel, there was a time where I myself was traveling a lot for events and different things. I'd had my first novel come out not very long ago. And travel in the context of tourism. And then I also, so I'm from Orlando, Florida, which is a place that's been where both economy and culture has been really powerfully shaped by tourism. So that whole landscape has been of interest to me for a long time. And then when the travel restrictions for Cuba were loosened, I became really interested in how Havana, in particular, because that was the place that was sort of like in every travel magazine, every travel blogger was like, I went to Havana. I took an Instagram photo with an old car in the sunset. It was great. And I became really interested in how the place was being narrated and who the narration seemed to be for, who it seemed to be explicitly not for what was being foregrounded, what was being left out entirely. And for like a million different reasons, Havana and Orlando are not at all comparable contexts. But at the same time, it was a place where I felt some sort of point of entry. And so that kind of came into the thought log. And then it took me sort of a long time to understand how these different kind of concerns or these different landscapes could maybe come to live within the same fictive world. And I went to see a lecture by a scholar of MIT in Cambridge named Paloma Duong. And she was giving a lecture on consumer culture in Havana. And she was talking quite a lot about tourism. And I realized I had meanwhile been reading a lot of film theory that the kind of language is sort of vocabulary that she was using. She was talking about guises and lenses and angles and so on, where it was very close to cinematic language. And that was sort of, I mean, there were subsequent moments of really powerful connection. But that was the first one I remember, where it was to sort of see the synergy between tourism, travel, and film. And to understand how they could kind of speak back to each other, I think that was sort of the first moments where I was like, OK, I could really like pull all of these different worlds into one macro world. One of the most kind of, for me, gratifying convergences or just kind of thematic overlaps is tourism and traveling and marriage. I love the way that you did that. That in some ways there's this, you show the contrast between intimacy or in both realms, there's this contrast of intimacy and estrangement and in both the state of being a tourist or a traveler and being in a marriage. I think that the kind of when the, actually, how do I talk about this without giving away too much? I mean, I don't know how much of a spoiler alert we want to have. But well, so actually, let me, knowing some more about the origin of the book, let me ask you about your experience of Havana, because you have been there, right? Yes, OK. So, and I remember reading, after having read, maybe it was just in the notes in the back of the best American short stories, but I remember after having read that wonderful story of yours, Antarctica, learning that, I mean, I guess no surprise you hadn't been to Antarctica. But then you kind of talked about the kind of the energy that you could sometimes get into a story from having not been to the place that you're writing about. And I was really interested in that kind of idea or that concept. And so what impact did going to Havana have on the story? And when did you go? And did you go after you kind of conceived of this plan? Or yeah. It was very interesting. It was the first time I'd done. So I took three research trips to Havana and one, so the pair goes to Havana to attend a film festival that her husband, who was killed in a hit-and-run accident under mysterious circumstances, had planned to attend. So she ends up sort of going in his place. So I took three research trips to Havana. This was like 2015, 2016, and two in 2016. And one was to attend the film festival that is the basis for the fictional film festival. In the novel. And yeah, I mean, I think the thing with Antarctica, it's like stupendously expensive to go to Antarctica. And you need a lot of time. And at the time that I wrote the story, not only did I not have that sort of bandwidth in my schedule, but I had no university funding, which just didn't seem plausible to go to Antarctica. And also I think for a short story, the kind of the demands in terms of the volume of information you need are different. But I think in this case, it was not so much just about the scale of the novel and the demands that the scale of the novel brings. It was also at that moment in time, so the novels pinned in 2015. And at that moment in time, certain sort of practical things were kind of shifting so quickly. It was actually very difficult to find reliable information on certain fronts. I mean, just really simple stuff like visas and the process in the airport and internet and currency, things like that. If you were setting the novel in 1975, you would have this sort of archival research that you could rely on a little bit more. But this, I think, to try and research into a moment that was happening, unspooling very much in the present tense, that sort of information wasn't really available. So it did feel important to me to take research trips myself and to move through spaces that Claire was moving through and to move through the space of the festival specifically and just sort of see what is this like? And from the POV of a traveler slash tourist, what are the procedures like and so on. But also, I think the thing that I came to understand that was really important about the book is that I wanted travel for Claire, the narrator, to sort of exist in three different contexts. One context is she was raised by innkeepers who managed a hotel in North Florida. So that's her childhood background. So it's like she's been in that position of being the kind of stationary entity that other people travel to and travel around. The second context is she's a sales rep, so as an adult, she's traveling all over the Midwest constantly for work. And then the third context is being at this film festival in Havana. And I've experienced versions of the other two contexts in a hands-on sort of way in that, as I'd said, I had written chunks of this novel when I myself was traveling a lot and moving through transit spaces, which are so interesting. I took the Concorde coach up for Boston and even in that two hours, all manner, fascinating human behavior was on display. So just, I'm sorry, this is a total sidebar. Like there was this tour, so I gleaned that there was this tour group who I presume lived somewhere in Maine and were coming home from a trip in Amsterdam. And like half of them weren't speaking to each other. And there was this whole complicated thing going on. So transit spaces of all sorts I think are really interesting. And then the context of being in film Florida and being sort of familiar with that world. So it also felt somehow disbalanced or disproportionate to be like, well, I've lived in two of these contexts to a certain degree, but I have no sort of physical contact with the third context. And so that, yeah, I mean, I just sort of felt like, you know, it was inevitable that some first head contact would bring, you know, layers that were, yeah, that were, would not be accessible otherwise. And I think also being, you know, from Florida too. I mean, you know, I mean, the island as a whole, but Havana even in isolation is like a stupendously complicated place. And I certainly don't presume, you know, any sort of expertise via research and research trips and so on. So I think the thing that, you know, my approach ultimately was to think about where those places where I do feel that I have a point of entry, the world of film, the world of hotels, the world of tourism, et cetera. And then to really sort of sink down into those areas. And it felt important and helpful to do that both via, you know, research and contact with other arts mediums and also in sort of a first hand kind of way. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, and the way that Havana is presented to us is through her eyes. So she is someone who's unfamiliar with this place. And so we're kind of like learning about it through, you know, as she's learning about it and she's making discoveries. And so those moments, like I love that little kind of aside about the melacon and how there used to be rooms inside the walls. So that's a little tidbit that she reads about and it contributes really nicely to kind of that part of the book and that moment. But it's just something that, you know, she's curious about the place and she's, so she's discovered that. And so that felt very organic to me. But so do you have, so you, did you have a draft of the book? I'm always curious to hear how and when writers research. Like did you have kind of a punch list of things that you needed to find out about or did you, I mean, you just referred to some of them, but did you also kind of want to just breathe the air? And yeah. Things, it also occurred to me that I've never, I love film, but I have no formal training in film and it occurred to me that I've never attended a film festival of any sort. And I had no idea how to describe a film festival, really. So just seeing sort of in a peripheral way. And I like had tickets, but no real, with not like any kind of proper affiliation. So I would sort of creep into these media events and just sort of lurk while people were being, you know, interviewed or panels were going on and so on. So that, yeah. So I mean, the film festival was important. And yeah, and there were some sort of physical places that I wanted to see that I wanted to move around. Some of it was to just breathe the air. But I think almost the place where I really got a bit in the weeds with research was film theory. I went down, I went down so many deeper rabbit holes with film theory and then I had like these drafts where it was like, here is every really neat thing I've ever learned about film that the characters will monologue about, apropos, of absolutely nothing. And I had friends essentially tell me, I appreciate that this is really interesting to you. Just anyone who's ever given a manuscript to like a friend to read, when they lead with that, you know whatever follows. It's like when someone says like, I don't mean to be offensive, but, oh God. So they're like, I appreciate that this is really interesting to you but I'm not sure that it's that interesting to this story. And someone had at a different event had asked what I thought was like quite interesting question in the audience where they said, okay, you're keeping this thought log in like, how do you know when, how do you know when there's something here that could turn into fiction as opposed to just your thoughts or your interests. And it was a question that I hadn't really considered before honestly because those sort of shifts feel somewhat intuitive to me as opposed to something that I'm kind of manufacturing in a more conscious or strategic way. But after thinking about it for a beat, I realized that there comes a moment where I feel like I'm writing lines or I'm describing things and it's not my point of view, it's the point of view of character, in this case the point of view of Claire. So it really, I really tried to just in general with the research, whether it be about place or film or travel or some other, you know, some other realm entirely to really allow those sort of details to have sort of life and shape through Claire's perspective. And if they didn't feel organic to her perspective, then they had to sort of, you know, it became scaffolding that had to come down even if I was like, but this is so cool. Like it didn't matter ultimately if it didn't, if it wasn't meaningful for her POV. And then, I mean, in part the way that the film festival and the film theory like actually comes to the reader is through her interaction or thoughts with the, or about the director and the actress and you know, her actually attending films. And that, I mean, I really liked that part of the book. And it, you know, I don't know anything about film theory and I actually have seen very few horror films. But I was thinking, I know that Richard, the film critic husband is a Hitchcock fan and I thought a lot about Vertigo while reading the book and also Mulholland Drive, the David Lynch film. And I thought that this, and also Joy Williams, who is, I just read that piece in the Atlantic or the interview where you discuss like your reverence for Joy Williams, who's a writer who like Laura writes terrific, vivid sentences that are, that are visceral with image. But she's not someone who always answers all the questions she poses in her writing. And that was, that seems to be kind of a central conceit to how the book operates. Like that there's a lot that goes unanswered and there's a lot that the reader is trying to grasp that, you know, kind of like disappears in thin air. So I wonder about, I want to just ask you about, about like that kind of storytelling because I feel like we are so trained, you know, in this culture to kind of get, to have that either happy ending or to have kind of all the threads tied together. So maybe were there, were there books that inspired you to take on this challenge? What, like where did, where did, where does that come from? Well, I mean, I love, as you clean from the Atlantic case, I mean, I really love Joy Williams. And she's a writer for those of you who don't know her work, you should find her like immediately. And she's a real genius not using the word, you know, and not using the word in sort of a hyperbolic way. But I mean, she's a very theologically engaged writer. And I think in some ways the sort of like a central sort of situation of a lot of her characters that there is this really complicated theological planes sort of vibrating over them. And because they're human with human limitations, they sort of can't grasp the reality of their situation in a way that's both immediate and like profound at the same time, if that makes sense. And so I think she's, I think her work is about, you know, consciousness in a lot of ways. And what is consciousness mean in the 21st century and what are the limits of consciousness, and so on. I'm aware I'm doing like a terrible job of like, selling her work. There are other things too. Some of it's very like breaking, you know, there's a lot of other stuff going on besides consciousness. But I think if that, yeah, if that is essentially your sort of subject, then it makes sense that you would be comfortable dealing with a high degree of sort of mystery and ambiguity. And I think I feel, I myself feel resistant to work that resolves stuff that is really like fundamentally irresolvable, if that makes sense. Like there's, you know, I think that, that said, that's my reading temperament. I think that there, you know, I'm absolutely like, a literature is a big tent sort of person, and we read for many different reasons, and we find meaning and shelter in many different kinds of books. And I feel like if someone is reading a book that's a positive thing, even if it's not, even if that book is not something I myself would be drawn toward. But I think Williams is a writer where, I mean, she writes with like tremendous insight. There's nothing vague or withholding about her writer. I think she gives readers so much. But she has no like zero interest in resolving what cannot be resolved. And she's not going to pretend for us that those certain questions can be resolved. She's just going to give shape to the question with as much sort of depth and precision and power as she can. And because she's Joy Williams, you know, she gives tremendous depth and precision and power to the questions that she's seeking to pose. And so I would not pretend to be at her at a William Zien level of that sort of task. But I think that I feel similarly motivated that I'm not really interested in resolving what cannot be resolved. And my sort of project is more thinking about what are the irresolvable questions that I want to pose with as much shape, precision and power as possible. At the same time, there are, I mean there are a number of mysteries in the third hotel, some of which are of the irresolvable nature and some of which are very resolvable actually. So there's an actress who goes missing over the course of the festival and there's sort of this open question of like, she missing what's happened to her and so on. And that is a mystery that is resolved in pretty definitive terms at the end of the book. And it was really deeply pleasurable to solve some of those mysteries and to kind of like do that sort of pot work. So I think that that, I don't, I would like to think that I'm not kind of withholding from readers because I don't, I haven't taken the time to think about what a potential answer might be, right? And I had drafts like that too, where there were these gaps in things where I'm like, I just didn't know. And I needed to know when I needed to figure it out and I needed to put some answers on the page. But I think the sort of kind of higher order project of thinking about fiction as a medium for posing really precisely defined sort of embodied questions versus providing definitive answers is one that resonates with me. I mean, one of the things that, when Richard first appears and he as a figure, this is her late husband, appears and then is kind of elusive and we're not kind of interacting with him right away. And then in the heart of the book, and this is what I got a chance to talk to my wife, a great deal about, there's the center of the book is completely absorbing and enthralling because the two of them are together in this kind of intimate and almost mundane way. Like she's with this person who is dead but not dead and those scenes are amazing. And that's, they're vivid, they're specific, we're seeing what he's doing, she's right next to him. So it's not just like this kind of shadowy ghost and you're like, what's going on? We get to kind of witness up close, those I think, you know, if you haven't yet started the book, the middle is so great. So I want to hear a little bit, I'd love to hear a little bit more generally about how you work and kind of the rhythm of your work life and yeah, I'll just leave that open-ended. I'd love to hear a little bit more about it. I'm so grateful to hear that you enjoyed the middle because I think the middle of a novel, I think the middle is the worst. The beginning, sometimes you would real feel for the beginning and to launch something is one thing and then maybe you have sort of a sense where it might end, but it's like everything hinges on the middle, you know, it's like the middle has to sort of realize the promise that's been extended in the opening sections and then of course is what paves the way for the ending and so on. I think for me with novels, you know, because they take the time that they take and even for like a slim book like this, it is a bigger canvas compared to that of a short story. Like practice is very important. I think what I'm writing short fiction, which really is this sort of way of working is more natural for me, but I've found that it just does not get the job done with novels. But when I'm working on a short story, I'll sort of like bop around where I don't work on it in a few days and I write a paragraph and I don't work on it for a week but then I write a few pages and so on and then it's sort of like one day you're like, oh, I have a track, like weird, how did that happen? But novels, I find, I've tried to do that with novels and it was not, and it just didn't work. I think in order to sort of stay in like the dream of it or to keep thinking the continuous thought, I really need to make contact with the book on a consistent and regular basis and so ideally that would mean working on it a little bit every day or almost every day but even if it's taking notes by hand or meeting sort of adjacent materials that when I took long breaks, I really lost my way and there's a little bit, I think, with a novel of kind of a confidence game too and I felt like if I took long breaks, I also lost nerve because if you stand too far away from it, you're like, oh my God, what am I doing? Yeah, yeah. What is this? So it's sort of like, you need to stay just close enough to keep the delusion sort of intact. But there were, and I think that there are real pleasures in that sort of depth of immersion. I mean, I think both for the third talent for my first novel, Find Me, I feel a real relationship to the central characters where it does feel like they'll be sort of for punter for worse, will be kind of a part of me always and that is a very special feeling and not one that I'm necessary, not a kind of relationship I've had with characters that belong to short stories that I've written. But it's also, and you like novelists in the room, you know, it's very demanding in its way. It was funny, I would spend a chunk of the sort of early part of this past summer in residency and I was only working on short stories that I kept waking up in the morning and thinking like, wow, like I really feel good and I feel this deep sense of optimism. Like, what's, what's, why? And then I realized it was because I was, you know, I was not working on a long form project. Where's the last residency I did when I was working on this novel? My poor husband, I called, I was in a beautiful, beautiful place that was wonderful and very kind. It was not their faults, but like I got into this horrible loop where I was trying to write the ending and I was having a really hard time and I would work through the night and write like in a manic state for, you know, eight hours and then I would fall asleep and I'd wake up in the morning and immediately start reading pages, you know, and I would go to sleep thinking, okay, like I've really cracked it. And then I would start reading pages and before, I mean like two sentences in, it would be like, oh no. Absolutely have not cracked it. And then the loop would repeat itself and then after I realized I had not cracked it, you know, I would call my poor husband at like six in the morning. He's a writer too, so I mean, he was long suffering, but, and I would just cry. I would stand in the woods and just cry. So there's that side also. But yeah, I think, you know, it's just, it's like, you know, it's, I was telling Louis when we were, before we came on stage that I started boxing last year and I'm now obsessed with boxing. But it's like, you know, it's like, if you're fighting, you know, you just, yeah, leave it all on the floor. So I think that, but I think that, yeah, the novel, like it will like, it will like sort of force you to leave it all on the floor. Like I don't think it's a form that really accommodates, you know, like, like halfwayness. Well, so follow up question on boxing. Yeah, so what, what initially drew you to that and then what has kept you in that, in that practice and you're like, what, what do you, what fires, fires you up about that? Well, I was feeling very upset about a wide range of things, both stuff that's happening in the world as I think feeling very upset is just like our baseline for most of us right now. And also had some difficult stuff. Like my dad's been really sick. I mean, I just had some sort of difficult stuff happening in the kind of family and personal realm. And I tried going to yoga because people were like, this is a good thing and you should go and it will calm your mind. And I'm sure that I'm doing it improperly, but the whole like empty your mind, et cetera. For me, like at the end of the yoga class, I felt really limber. But it just, instead of my mind emptying, it was just like a rising sea of anxiety just filling throughout the class. So at the end of, you know, an hour or whatever, like my shoulders were loose, but my mind was like, so I got a rep for a friend from a boxing gym in Boston. And I thought, well, I'll try this out. Just also to contextualize this, I've never played a sport of any kind ever. I'm like the least sporty person. And so I went and I didn't know how to wrap my hands. I didn't know how to throw like even like the jab, like the most sort of basic fundamental punch. But yet immediately I was sort of like, I'm so into this. And I felt less upset when I left and less anxious. And I think I was, as someone who teaches creative writing, like I became the equivalent of the student who has like no natural aptitude for musicality of sentences or narrative or anything like that. But they were like, but I'll work really hard and I'll show up and I'll come to all your office hours. And the coaches were like, oh, you're still here. I guess this is like a thing that, you know, we're like a bit stuck with you. And I'm like, yeah, I think you are. And so I started to work with one person like, you know, fairly seriously and made progress and so on. But no, it's like, I completely love it. And it's all, I mean, there's so, I think there's so much. I mean, a lot of like Catherine Dunn's writer that I love. I mean, there are many writers have written about sort of the intersections between writing and boxing and my, yeah, coach who's like 23, he's named Shane. He says stuff all the time where I'm just, and I like ferry it immediately into my workshop. Like once he said to us that there's intensity doesn't matter without precision. I was like, oh yeah, that's very salient to writing fiction. So yeah, so there's like, I feel like he's like, he's providing at least like a fifth of the syllabus of this. That's good. So I think we'd all love to hear you read. And so maybe we should do that now. And then I think after Laura reads for about 10 minutes, love to hear questions from you. I mean, I may have some remaining questions as well, but yeah. Just to contextualize this chapter a little bit, this comes, this is the second chapter in the novel and it just tells you a little bit about what was going on between Claire and Richard. Her horror film scholar husband before he died. In her former life, Claire was a sales rep for Tusancrop. Her area was elevator technologies and her territory was the Midwest. She liked the job because it involved an endless amount of travel to seemingly anonymous places. She had been to Nebraska 47 times. What was there to see in Nebraska? A surprising amount, really. She knew where to get the best steak in Omaha when she cut into it, blood pooled on the white plate. She had seen Dawn turn the planes as lustrous and vast as an ocean. Once late at night, she parked her rental car on the side of the road and walked into a cornfield. She stood on a dirt path surrounded by dark stalks and imagined a harrowing chase through the corn that culminated in her murder at the hands of a mass killer with a knife. In the night sky, she spotted the red flash of planes through gossamer clouds and if she listened very carefully, more carefully than she'd listened to anything in months or maybe even in years. She was able to make out the dull roar of their passing. She got back into her rental car and drove away and wondered if this was what people meant when they talked about mindfulness. Early in her career, she learned that one of the most important rules of travel was this. The answer to nearly everything could be found in the signs. This way to baggage claim, this way to the ticket counter, this way to Cleveland, this way to Omaha, this way to the hotel bar. Travel was one of the few arenas in life where clear and correct direction was so readily at hand. Lately, she had been tasked with selling a new kind of cable to find hotels and high-rise office buildings and factories. This cable was made of carbon fiber and allowed elevators to travel twice as fast as they could with steel. They lived in New Scotland, a town on the outskirts of Albany. In their condominium, she kept a small rolling suitcase in the bedroom closet stocked with miniature toiletries, exercise clothes and inflatable neck pillow and the book she brought with her on every flight but could never seem to finish. The Two Faces of January by Patricia Highsmith. It wasn't an especially long novel but on plain she could only read a few paragraphs before the words filled her with a crippling and inexplicable dread, driving the book back down into the depths of her shoulder bag. It was not so much the story that unsettled her but the hidden things she sensed quivering under the surface. Subtext, she supposed this was called and she did not care for it. Every time she saw her suitcase in the bedroom closet, tucked behind a mesh laundry bin, she imagined it was waiting for her second secret self. She traveled so frequently, it was not uncommon for her to wake in the middle of the night and think for a moment, where am I? She did not find this disconcerting even when it happened in her own bed but once she made the mistake of mentioning those midnight thoughts to her husband and he looked at her like she was terminally ill. The travel had long been a point of contention between them. Why bother being married if you're always leaving? A reasonable question and she couldn't say that she had an answer beyond the demands of her work. She wanted to be married and she wanted to leave. The Two did not seem mutually exclusive. She had this second secret self that she didn't know how to share with anyone and when alone that self came out into the open. In the months before his death, her husband's own secret self started coming out into the open too. She could only assume this other self had been waiting inside him all along. The year of the Great Change, she was the same and he was different. The way he looked when a seat changed, his face used to be smooth and expressionless, almost mask like but then one night she found him sleeping with lips parted into a wide unsettling smile. He switched coffee mugs trading out the exorcist for the ghoulish face of Michael Myers. He was newly skittish around dogs. He stopped adding salt to his food. He stopped eating bananas. His pace on the sidewalk changed. He used to be a brisk and patient walker and then one day he began moving so slowly and contemplatively it was as though every tree branch was a source of wonder. Claire struggled to imagine what 40 years into a life would cause a person to suddenly change the way they walked. There were alien and terminal silences when she called from the road and when she was home he took long solitary strolls in the evening hours. The symptom that would eventually lead to his demise. Another symptom. He started demanding to know what she did on the road, how she accounted for all those hours alone. No matter how many times she told him the simple truth. In a hotel room her favorite thing in all the world was to switch off every light and everything that made a sound. TV, phone, air conditioner, faucets and sit naked on the polyester comforter and count the breaths as they left her body naked. Her husband would shout. As though she had provided him with damning evidence. He had been an angry person for as long as she had known him but it was a secretive anger. Most people found him loose and light-hearted, easy going. That was the word people used and in time she became suspicious of anyone who could be described in such terms. What was so easy about going? Naked and alone she would say back, naked and alone. As a married couple they'd had perfect years and they'd had shit years but she had never in her life experienced a year that so thoroughly dismantled her with confusion. On her next trip, she thought about what he would see if he ever were to trail her on the road. A woman marking up sales reports with a pink highlighter. A woman watching workout infomercials with a volume on mute. A woman eating room service quesadillas in the bathtub instead of reading that novel she claimed to be nearly finished with. A woman doing a little exercise routine, squats and sit-ups, bicep curls with bottled waters completed with the hope that he would notice the smooth lines when he put his hands on her body. A woman breathing naked on the toilet seat. A woman breathing naked in an arm chair. A woman breathing naked before the bathroom mirror in the kind of lighting that can make a person reconsider every choice they had ever made in life. A woman breathing naked in the dark. Torture the women. Hitchcock was reported to have said when a young director asked him for advice. Claire never did have an affair on the road, but she did accumulate a lot of secrets about the odd things she had heard and seen. There were the dentures she discovered in the back pocket on the flight to Toledo later removed by a flight attendant wearing blue rubber gloves. People, the flight attendant said. The imposter teeth suspended between her fingers. The Midwestern hotels that could have belonged to a horse set with their fluorescent hallways and lurching elevators and the eerie rattle of the ice machine in the middle of the night. The phone that rang on the hour in which it hawed when she picked up, no one was on the line. The receptionist in Cincinnati who told Claire that once a woman fell into such a deep sleep in this hotel, she never woke up. She didn't die, the receptionist clarified, slipping a room key into its little envelope, but went into some kind of coma and was taken out on a stretcher to a hospital somewhere and would likely be in this hospital for the rest of her life on account of her having never woken up. I don't think that story is good for business, Claire said as she took her room key. The receptionist shrugged. The nade tag pinned to her blouse read Samantha. The more Claire looked at the tag, the more she got the uneasy feeling that Samantha was not her real name. Some people think it's the best story they ever heard. Samantha, not Samantha, said. The very strangest thing happened in a hotel room in Omaha in her beloved state of Nebraska. She opened the bedside drawer and next to the King James Bible lay a fingernail so small that it could have only belonged to a pinky but fully intact and flawless in its shape. Her first impulse was to pick up the nail and swallow it. A thought so startling, she slammed the drawer shut and turned on the TV and tried to watch an episode of Law and Order in which a man was suspected of killing both his first and second wives. Even though the cops found hard evidence, the killer ended up going free on a legal technicality and marrying for the third time. She couldn't forget about the fingernail. She fell asleep with the drawer open and all through the night she would wake up and turn on the bedside lamp and peer down at the nail. The light gave it a pearly translucent, made it look like a precious thing on display. In hotels, she tried to be a respectful guest. Before leaving, she closed all the drawers and piled up the towels in the bathroom and recycled the paper coffee cups but that morning she found she could not close the bedside drawer, could not seal the nail up in darkness again. As she wheeled her suitcase into the carpet hall, she wondered what kind of person would abandon to a hotel room drawer, such a perfect specimen of their existence. Where did the fingernail come from? It happened, that's a real, yeah it was an acrylic nail and not just like a straight up fingernail but still. Yeah, yeah. And it was just, I think it might have been in Maine. There was a period of time I taught at Colby for a bit and I was commuting from Massachusetts to Waterville and I had my puppy who now is like an 80 pound dog but I would take my puppy and we spent a lot of nights in hotels in central Maine and yeah, I'm pretty sure it was in Maine actually but yeah, it was just right there. This excerpt, I think this is one of the things that the book does so well is provides that commentary about like what it means to know someone and that, you know the kind of intimacy versus estrangement in that marriage. I like how you, when the detective asks her to describe their marriage, she has kind of this long list of intimate kind of quotidian things but she realizes as she's listing off all of these things that these particulars of her marriage, she's like, well what does that all head up to? So, questions from you all. I'd love to hear any questions that Brock or Cece have for Laura. No pressure. All right, so I was curious that the dreamiest, the dream state gets to the book whether this is something in the voice in the very beginning or maybe along the end of the soul, I'm not sure if you've read that book. Yes. It's what I love about this and singing is it takes her a page long so congratulations on doing it, bless the parent pages. But I'm wondering if that was part of the voice to begin with or whether that was something you came upon as some of the things sort of felt like. Yeah, I think there's the kind of dream state slash nightmare state that could accurately describe much of the novel. I mean, I think that I also love the un-console. And I love books that operate in that sort of another realm between sort of awake and asleep, living and dead, et cetera. Just the liminality of those sorts of books has always been really appealing to me as a reader and thus as a writer. But I also think a lot of the influence came from horror. You know what I mean? I think in some ways, the most artful examples of the genre use these sort of extreme dislocations of reality and plunge characters into these kind of hallucinatory nightmare states in the service of accessing human material that's really fundamental and vital. And so I wanted to sort of explore using some similar devices to create that kind of effect in the context of a novel. I did not, yeah. So that would be an example, like a thought log example of that wasn't something that I personally felt a compulsion to do. But it like immediately I was like maybe, you know, maybe Claire would that it was a very, it's a straight, it's a hazy border, right? I mean, of course you're inventing the character. It's not like it's some real world person that's sort of like walked out and you know, plopped down in the center of your life. But it's this very kind of like fine night hazy thing of sort of delineating like consciousness that's come from your consciousness but is also separate in its way. That actually was my question. But I appreciate that you, you said something earlier that I thought was really interesting, you know, we all can hear right what you know. But you said something about points of entry that I think is, I think probably different than what you know in a really meaningful way. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, well I think that, you know, I mean, I think that's the idea of like what we know is also sort of, I think sometimes the way that that advice is proffered in the way that we might hear it is sort of like literally right what you know. So for me, if I grew up, you know, I was like, okay, what do I know? At a certain moment in my life, now I've come to know more things like dogs and boxing and New England and hotels in Waterville. But yeah, at a certain time, I was like really sort of alarmed by that advice. So I was like, okay, I know like hurricanes, malls, parking lots, like how to roll cigarettes. Like it was like really bad boyfriends. Like it was like a fairly short list. So I think it took me a while to understand that like what we know is sort of a spectrum. And I think of that, so there's the stuff that we, you know, we can immediately identify like these were sort of worlds or realms of experience that we feel like we know with some degree of intimacy. But I think, you know, often of that Joan Diddy in line where I have to write to know what I think. And I think one really powerful experience that's adjacent to writing fiction is that you write, you end up writing into all the stuff. I'm terrified I'm gonna sound like Donald Rumsfeld. You end up writing into all the stuff that you didn't know that you knew. That's that. But we know, we know, we don't know, we don't know, we don't know. But there is the like what we don't know, what we don't know, we don't know for fiction. And so you end up writing into all the stuff. You're like, oh wow, I actually didn't realize that this was contained within me. I didn't realize that I knew it. Maybe I wasn't prepared to reckon with the fact that I knew it. I think that can be a real thing also, but like it turns out that I do, I am and I, you know, I do and I am. But I also think that for me it's sort of important to write into what I want to know and what interests me about the world at large and to invent, you know, to invent stuff that is outside of my own lived experience. But I think for me it's this, there's this sort of overlapping sort of, you know, these kind of like, this like Venn diagram of, you know, what is your sort of experiential realm? What is not? And where do those circles kind of overlap? And like that's your point of entry. And it's certainly not to suggest that that's how it always has to work, but I think for me, if there's not that kind of Venn overlap, then it might be, it still can feel personally interesting to me or important or something I'm interested in reading other writers write about, but it's not necessarily something that I'm inclined to approach myself in the context of my own fiction. I've been thinking a lot about performance, so anything that I love to read in it, as a reading brought me into a space that was like reading, like reading a book myself, but also very few and another type of security is how that, how, I don't know, how performance is important to you as you're making stuff. Is it important at all to think about what we're doing or what? Yeah, oh my, well I think, I mean, sound is important to me. I do read my work, I read novels aloud over and over and over again, so I think the kind of musicality of sentences and the sounds of sentences matter to me a great deal, and it's my hope that that sort of carries over into a reading context, but I really admire writers who's inevitable. I really admire writers who are, who have where it's sort of like they step onto stage and they become kind of a slightly different person and that performance context is really like an important part of their art form or an important part of their medium. I don't necessarily, would not necessarily sort of slot myself into that group, but I do think a lot about sort of sound and rhythm and how things sound aloud, so yeah, I think that might be the best answer that I have. I think you're good for forward, but you know, it's not going on as you know. That's all I got to say. That's a fast one, thank you. I think there's something recently about the, the title story of the first collection is going to be a movie, is that happening in the opening for the show? Yeah, of course. So the titles, the title story of my first collection, which came out just a little less than 10 years ago, is called, the story is called What the World and the Collection. It's called What the World Will Look Like when All the Water Leaves Us. And this is a very interesting story. I'll preface this by saying that I sort of, I don't know that much about the film world, so it's like my first kind of contact with it, but my understanding is that very often when literary works are optioned, it's optioned by the really famous actor, by a studio, and then sort of, that's like the first kind of domino and the process and thrills from there. And this process went in kind of the opposite direction where it's actually a former cost fate of mine, my MFA program, who had stopped writing fiction, but who had become a screenwriter, reached out maybe like four or five years ago, quite a while ago and said, I've been thinking about the story, thinking about the story, thinking about the story. I would really love to adapt it. Will you like let me take a crack at it? And she talked to my film agent and they decided, they sort of came to an agreement. And then over time she attached a producer and a really wonderful director, Australian director named Claire McCarthy, and they just sort of built this project very, very slowly. And then Naomi Watts earlier this year came on board to play the lead and they premiered, not that they haven't shot to fill me up, but the sort of project premiered at Khan and was funded and so on. So I think I believe their plan is to begin shooting next, or I guess it would now be summer's over, I've heard. I'm in denial, the tomatoes still taste really good. So whatever, but I guess it would, I can't say next summer, but this most recent summer of 2019. I had a friend who works in film, tell me one thing, making a film is like playing Jenga in a wind tunnel, but every piece costs $5 billion. So my understanding is sort of like, you can't know for sure until it's actually been shot, but that's where things stand. Yeah, so it's about a primatologist, an American primatologist who's working at a gas farm and has been sort of dragging her, teenage daughter around with her and their relationship, we just kind of a breaking point during that time. So I think they're planning to shoot in Madagascar and also in South Africa. And a film sort of thing, what do you have in favor of the film? Because I know far, clearly, is it a genre and does the team have one? Yeah, okay. I have genres of, I'll try and, again, this is something I've been working to condense. So I think Halloween, the original Halloween, like each incarnation gets worse with each installment, but the original Halloween is like a stone cold masterpiece. It was actually a film that in the context of this book where I wanted to think, I was thinking a lot about the spatial dimensions and how the spatial dimensions could become sort of increasingly claustrophobic. Halloween is like the use of space and the way the spatial possibilities like winnow and winnow and winnow over the course of the film. I would say that that more than like Michael Myers even is the source of sort of terror and dread. And I love that you're nodding. You're like, you're totally with me. Fantastic. Is like the real source of terror and dread. But that is, I mean, just structurally, it's incredible. It's an incredible, like the structure of that movie is just flawless. And it's sort of remarkable to me that, say for the opening sequence, it's 85 minutes long, so it's super tight, right? Very short. Like no one dies for 55 minutes. It's like three quarters, just like art of anticipation. And then you get this kind of unleashing in the last stretch. So obviously I have passionate feelings about Halloween. I feel very complicated about Hitchcock and I feel like very complicated feelings about feeling like Hitchcock has been a sort of important influence, but I think Vertigo is a pretty exceptional movie. I feel for similar reasons, very complicated about Kubrick. Kubrick, but the shining certainly. And I love, I think it's been really exciting to see a kind of wave of women who are writing and directing horror and one of my favorite more recent horror movies that I think to me is just sort of like the pinnacle of what the genre can do and sort of the more psychological realm is Jennifer Kent's The Babadook, which is terrifying. But she maintains this sort of beautiful ambiguity about is the family actually being menaced by this creature or has the emotional weather of these two characters, mother and son, who are under sort of extraordinary amounts of pressure, conjured this sort of force? Or can both of those things be true simultaneously? And I think it's incredible movie. But I think with that movie, a girl walks home alone at night and in some other directions. It's like we're seeing not just kind of like pseudo feminist horror, which there are those incarnations with kind of the slasher and the final girl and so on, but like true feminist narratives in horror. And it's exciting and I want to see more of it.