 come closer. We'll just pretend it's a table for two. I think those people are listening to everything we say. Hi, I'm Bill Rohrabuck. This is Kate Christensen, as you know, and we're here to celebrate her book, The Last Cruise, which I've been involved with for a while. You have, it's true. We traded books, traded manuscripts. I don't know, how long ago was that? Three years ago. You're like in our 20s. And then, you know, one had dinner someplace in... Four Street. Four Street. And we compared notes. It was really rich. You know, it's a great writer-friendship developing, right? And we've continued to... So I've read several drafts, and I just finished reading it yet again. And the testament to the book is that I've enjoyed it so much each time, you know? And it's each time these large changes, incremental changes. This last draft, it's incremental beauties, you know, that add up to a different experience. Completely for me. I really loved it. Okay, Kate. Thank you. So you grew up in... Where did you grow up? Arizona? Arizona is that? I was born in Berkeley. Berkeley. And I lived there for eight years during the 60s, which was an interesting time. As a kid. As a kid. Yeah. And then moved to Arizona in 1970 and lived there for another eight years. That was high school. First two years of high school. Then on. But third grade until my junior year of high school. So I think I grew up in Arizona. I mean, I don't really remember much about Berkeley beyond sort of... No one remembers much about Berkeley. And I was sober the whole time. We called it berserkly, as I recall. And then, okay, so then the trajectory from high school, just being a regular kid, what happened next? After high school? Yeah. I took a couple of years off. I lived in France for a year. What were you doing in France? Well, so here's the thing. The chairman of my high school was sleeping with my friend because it was the 70s. I don't know how many of you remember the 70s, but that was what they did back then. And he was distracted. So he gave me the wrong financial aid form for college. So I got into Reed with great financial aid for my senior year of high school. So I had to take a year off. So I got a job in the middle of France, not Paris, nowhere glamorous, but this muddy district nondescript called the Allier. And the big city in the Allier is called Moulin. Oh, Moulin. Big deal to go to, yeah, right? The mill. You remember it fondly. So I lived at a Rudolph Steiner school and worked taking care of four small boys. And I hate children. This is why I didn't have them. But I did discover food in France. I discovered things like lettuce. I hadn't eaten. I mean, iceberg was what we had in Arizona. I discovered lamb's ear lettuce, which they called mash, and all these other things in France and learn French. And then after you're in France, where you hated the kids, I noticed your characters never have kids in your book. Or if they do, they're sort of adopted or not really theirs or there's some complication. Or they're pets. Or they're animals. Or they've killed them by accident. OK, so after France, that's cool. So did then you go to college? No, then I had to take another year off because I didn't get my shit together in France to apply for financial aid for the following year. Can we blame this on the guy who is sleeping with your friend? Yeah, it's indirectly his fault because I had to leave the country. Who can fill out forms in France and mail them? Nobody. So then, OK, so another year goes by, where? I worked, again, a job for which I had no affinity whatsoever. I worked as the assistant to an architect and contractor who was building another Rudolf Steiner school in Harlemville, New York. And I was his assistant, which is, and I made $4 an hour. That was 1979. No. Probably minimum wage. Yeah, it was like minimum wage back then. But I earned enough to get myself to read the following year with financial aid. To read college in Portland, Oregon. That's correct. So now you're in Portland, Oregon. That's right. How was college? Yeah, I loved it. Everyone there was a damn weirdo. I hated college. I was so depressed the whole time. Where did you go? I didn't know I was depressed until like 40 years later. Because I went back, they had me back as a distinguished alumni scholar or something. Where? Ithaca College. And I'm at dinner with the president and the dean and everything. And the dean goes, I remember you. And I look at him and go, Ricky Johnson? Like the drug guy? You're the dean? Yeah, I'm the dean. And I'm like, now I see why I'm back as a, but anyway, being on the campus back there, I walked around and I had this horrible, dark feeling overcoming, you know, that I realized was how I felt the whole time I was at college. It's in upstate New York. Yeah. I was depressed the entire time I lived in upstate New York. Where did you live in upstate New York? I lived in Spencer Town. Oh, shit. Yeah, right? I think the nickname of Spencer Town is Rape Town. Yeah. It's like population 12. How many rapes could there be? Well, there were 12, and that was the end of it. OK, so back to, OK, so Reed College was a success for you? What was your focus? I was getting an education and doing drugs because it was a good school. What kind of drugs did you like to do? Well, we had access to just about anything we wanted. And I felt like it was, as a Reedy, it was my duty to sort of take a lot of classes and sample a lot of different kinds of drugs. Yeah, experience for a writer that's important. It was, yeah. OK. I like how frank you are about that. If anyone is shocked, I apologize. But it's my brain. Well, what's great is now you can sit in a room full of old people, and they all laugh at drug jokes. Old people used to not like this. Now everyone likes this. Old people aren't what they used to be. They're all out of rehab now. OK, so now after Reed, what did you do? You came out with an education. I came out with an education, and then I became a cocktail waitress for a year. Good. Which was awesome. That's the best job I've ever had. Great money. Great money. And like I could rip off drunk asshole men who would, well, I mean, they felt my butt, so I charged them for it. That was basically the goal, right? So after you were prostitute, what was next? I mean, where do you go from there? I went to the Iowa Writers Workshop. Was that in Portland, Portland, Oregon? That was Portland, Oregon. Your other Portland? And so I was on the phone with my mother saying, you know, I really like cocktail waitressing. I think I might make this a career. I was deadly serious. Like I'm really getting a lot out of it. I'm making a lot of money. I wear miniskirts. It's really fun. I meet all the bands and hang out with them afterwards. My mother said, OK, but do me a favor, just apply to the Iowa Writers Workshop. Oh, wow. So I did. And that was how long after college? A year. I only had a year in my best career ever. Bruce and I were in the bands that you would hang out with. OK, so after, so now you got into the Iowa Writers Workshop. It's miraculous. How did that feel? It felt amazing. So it was the best moment of my life as a writer. When I received that letter and I thought, I'm going to be a writer. It's going to be great. Wait, wait, what made your mom say apply to that? You must have already been writing. Because I was always writing. You're always starting like what, high school? Starting like six years old. Even when you're a little, little girl. Yeah. Right? Yeah. You knew. Yeah. Well, my mother knew it. OK, that's a good distinction. All right, so now you're at Iowa Writers Workshop. How did that go? Did you go in and feel like on top of it? Or did you feel underneath it? I so didn't feel on top of it. I so felt underneath it. No, but it was a brutal place. And I was 25. And I feel like I didn't know what I was doing as a writer. I wrote a creative thesis at Reed, which was a big deal at Reed because it's a very academic school. So I basically had to give my advisor a pint of my blood to be allowed to do it. I had to petition. I had to meet with her. I had to prove that I was really serious about writing. And then two of those stories got me into the Writers Workshop. Brilliant. It was great. I know I was so excited. I remember getting the letter and thinking, well, I guess I'll go. If I get in, I'll go. Affirmation not only inside, but people like parents are like, oh, she really is. Well, my mother was happy. But it was an awful place. It was so awful. What did the teacher do with the blood that you gave her? She drank it. OK, and how was it awful? The Idle Writers Workshop? It was the beginning of the reign of Frank Conroy. Did anyone here go to the Idle Writers Workshop? No, good. So I was there for the beginning of the reign of Frank Conroy, who was the director of the workshop for many years. And I took his first ever workshop. This is just an example of how awful it was. In the workshop, he decided that it would be really fun to make every young woman who was writing a coming-of-age novel, i.e., all of us cry at some point during the course of the semester. He didn't make me cry. I was really proud. It's like the best thing that happened at Iowa. But it was a competitive place. And it was very skewed toward white men writing sort of Raymond Carver-esque fiction. Yes, a little careerist. Lead careers. And of course, in Iowa, in case there's any people here who don't know it, that's kind of the preeminent, maybe still is, MFA, Program Master of Fine Arts and Writing. Flannery O'Connor went there. It was the oldest in the country. And the trail of controversy follows it everywhere it goes because people are. Because people like me are just saying how awful it was. People are jealous on the one hand, or they've had a hard time there. Other people love it, of course. It was scary and competitive. And I was a young, sort of vulnerable, naive writer and just living in my writing, in my little world of writing. And really, the truth about it is I wasn't ready to have it torn to shreds. I was still in that sort of little cocoon of being young. I should have gone to San Francisco. What year would this have been? This was 1988, I think. The middle of the whole Esth thing where truth at all costs, and yeah. It was kind of the Kmart realism thing. Yeah, that was going on. You all remember that? And Beatty? No, at the time, she was the best. And I wanted to be her. And Raymond Carver and sort of, there were all these beautiful little vintage contemporary books by really cool writers that. Edited by? Yes, Gary Fiskechin. No, was that? That's one of them. It was, you know, Raymond Carver's. Thank you. Gordon Lyscia, who, Carver disavowed him at a certain point and said, I'm going to start publishing my stories the way I, and his last stories are maximalists. That check off story is 40 some pages, beautiful, lyrical prose, all the shit that, the stuff that Lysce cut out, you know? Anyway, that's boring for everyone. So now, you go through this, you're miserable, and then you get out of the, you get out with your MFA? Did you finish? I did, yeah. All right, and now it's, you're still a you. You're still the kind of person who's miserable at Iowa. Wow, did anything change, or did you, where did you go next? New York. Ah, New York. And what happened there? That's funny. I was, now was I still there? Yeah, I was still living there when you came to New York. We could have known each other. Where were you living? We've been together all these years. I know. I lived in Soho first, and then I moved to the Meat District. Both places are very different now. When I lived there, they were rugged places, and the Meat District was terrifying, you know? And now it's the new Whitney, is there? But I loved it. Okay, where did you live? Oh, I started out in this weird no-name neighborhood in downtown Brooklyn, St. Mark's, between 3rd and 4th Avenues. What'd you do? I worked in publishing. I got a job as an assistant at William Morrow, which I lasted nine months. I was a terrible assistant, but I was really good at reading and rejecting manuscripts. That was my forte. And I saw some of the manuscripts like Gish-Gen, the writer Gish-Gen. I read her first book, and I thought, oh no, she'll never go anywhere, so I rejected that. So I made some mistakes. I was wrong. But I remember sitting at this desk right outside my, the editor I worked for was named Susan Leon. She was great. And I remember I sat at this little desk outside her office answering her phone. We had typewriters back then. Maybe we had computers. I guess, yeah, we had computers. 86, she might have started having computers. No, this was 89. You probably would have had computers. I think there was a computer, but I think I used a typewriter for everything. There'd be one central computer with a guy. Yeah, with a guy. And he wanted to be on his good side. I can't remember why. But I remember watching the writers come in to meet with Susan, the real writers. And I would sit at my desk and look at them and think, I want to be that person. And, but who did you end up being? In other words, how did you transition from editor's assistant to the writer you wanted to be? You started the beginning of that. Well, it took me 10 years. Oh, let's do the 10 years really quickly. So you're in New York that whole 10 years? I was in New York for 20 years. 20 years, okay. And what did you do for 10 years? All different things. In list form. Okay. Worked in publishing. I actually did phone sex also, as like part of my prostitution career. Yeah. I did too, but from the other side. Maybe we, you know. No, I didn't. I didn't actually talk to anyone. I want to make that clear. But I always felt really bad ass because I went to Channel J. What do you mean? This was like self phone sex? It was recorded. I would write these scripts and read them into a microphone for 20 bucks a pop. Publishing didn't pay anything. I made $17,000 a year. And that wasn't even a lot of money back then. Do you have any of these scripts memorized? Because that's like, that's her early writing, right? This is lost early writing. We have to recover this. Notice the attention to character. Anyway, keep going. There was a lot of attention to character. They were good. They were really good. They were good. Yeah. I was an underrated phone sex artist. So I did those two things simultaneously because I had to supplement my meager income somehow. And then I worked for a Countess on the Upper East Side as her ghost writer and assistant. Oh my gosh. For another year. Which became my first novel in The Drink. The Drink. Based on an actual job I had. The Drink I haven't read. Well, you read it, you can know that I actually had that job. I'm gonna find it. Okay. And that keep going. Oh, that's a, but if you, not for a few years, it became your first novel. Well, yeah, well, so I worked for her for a year. It was a, she was fascinating. She was, she was a spy in the OSS in Madrid. And she was a model for Hattie Carnegie. And she married the Count of Romanone. She was a lean Griffith from Pearl River, New York. And she ended up marrying the Count of Romanones who she met at a party when she was spying for the OSS. And he, by all reports, was gay and needed this beautiful young Catholic virgin to marry and give him sons, which she did. And then he died and she moved back to New York and had this apartment, this mausoleum of a pied-a-terre on the Upper East Side. Where I sat in her dining room every day talking to Emelda Marcos, Nancy Reagan and Betsy Bloomingdale and yeah. I think this is what young writers do. If they're, if they're doing it right, is they amass experience. You have to. And then you've got stuff to work with. Okay, so I would love to linger over the counters. I quit. I quit that job. But you quit and then? Went to another Rudolph Steiner school to work as a receptionist. And that's where I started in the drink. At the school. Sitting at my desk. And by now I was using a little word processor. Now we're on a computer. The screen note was just a word processor. Oh, I remember those. The screen was this big. It was like one line at a time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't you remember? I read that William Styron had bought a word processor for $12,000. And I was like, oh my God, you could type it, correct it, you know, it'd still be, I saw it all, like a vision. But I wasn't capable of inventing the laptop. But it was so great when I first got one of those. I know, it's the best thing. Also the worst thing. No, it's the best thing. Is it just the best thing? There's no mixed blessing for you? Well, social media kind of takes up a little bit of time. But, you know, how else would anyone here know about today without, oh, there's other ways? Okay, so, okay, so now, so you did that, someone, and you wrote the book, how'd you get that published? How did that happen? That was hard. That was really hard. And I would think back to that day when I got my acceptance to the Iowa Writers Workshop and think I was so naive, thinking that just, you know, that would launch me on some imaginary trajectory that, you know, that I would, oh, of course, I would write a novel and publish it and it would all just come about because I was now a writer. It didn't happen like that. What happened was that I wrote a really bad draft of In the Drink, but I fell in love with it. And I got back to, writing In the Drink for me was getting away from Iowa and getting away from that kind of writing that I thought I should be doing. Back to the kind of writing I did in eighth grade when I wrote my first book, my first full-length novel. It was called Life Can't Be a Penguin. And I know, it's a great title. Nothing like a true title. Yeah. Okay. And the protagonist was named Claudia and I named my protagonist Claudia and I started just having fun with writing. Claimed yourself. You reclaimed your kid. That's brilliant. And it took, but it took me like 10 years before it was published. Okay, now quickly then, what's working our way up to the last cruise? Did you ever work in restaurants or? I was a line cook in Portland, Oregon, also while I was being a cocktail waitress. I worked at Roxy Hart's Diner, World Diner, which was a gay diner, and I did the night shift with my best friend, Wayne, who was just coming out of the closet and really excited about it. And so we would cook for the post bar rush. Yeah, yeah. And all these gay men would come in just like glittery and drunk and high and like, and we would just put enormous garnishes on their food to crack them up. But I think that's my only real, I mean I volunteered at a soup kitchen but this is all good to know. But it's not, I've never really worked in a... It's not much. So it's not like to write such a perfect, beautiful, interesting chef with a real life behind him and then his acolytes and his boss, all very different, very convincing food people. You don't have to do that. No. Because you can make it up. Make it up. That's the amazing thing about fiction. This is a great thing. It's true. It's amazing. It's true. Wow. Okay, well by way of getting us into the last cruise, do you feel like reading a little bit? Or... Sure. Do you guys wanna hear a little bit? Thank you. Because it's so hot out, I have two scenes where people swim. I'm gonna read them to you. What do I need to tell them about the book? It's about a cruise ship. It's a fictional cruise ship. I made it up. It's a vintage... Have you been on a lot of cruise ships? I've never been on a cruise ship. Do you have a great affection for cruise ships? I have zero affection for cruise ships. I also have a phobia of cruises that was not diminished by writing this book. No. So I set my character's adrift in the Pacific on a 1950s vintage-era cruise ship making her last cruise, hence the title. One of the reasons for the title. And going to Hawaii and back from Long Beach, California on what is supposed to be a two-week cruise. And... Say, it opens with, you get to know there's three sets of characters, right? So there's an Israeli string quartet. They're gonna have a job of entertaining. Then there's Mick, the head chef for the cruise, who's all pressured and stressed, but he's a brilliant character. And then there's his, the people under him. And then there's Christine and... Valerie. Valerie, I was gonna say Vivian, but it's Valerie. And they're friends, all right? So, but you have a music background? I do, I've studied violin for 10 years, pretty seriously. Well, I mean, as a kid. This is what this novelist is doing. Someone who hates cruise ship is making a perfectly believable milieu of the cruise ship. Making an incredibly touching, beautiful four-way relationship of the string quartet with deep musical knowledge. And then doing a kitchen with seemingly deep kitchen novel, I mean knowledge. That sets it up. So, and then we get all these people, we have a sense of what all the pressures are on them, and then off the ship goes into the ocean. That's enough to get started, you think? I know, I should have taken you on tour with me. It would have been nice. I love it a lot, too, the book is good. I should say about Christine. She's a main farmer. And she's in her 30s, and she's married to a main farmer. She was a journalist in New York and left to move home to Maine and be a farmer's wife, like her mother and grandmother and great-grandmother. Her best friend Valerie has invited her as her plus one on this cruise. She's still a journalist in New York, which kind of sets up the scene, I think. Ready? Okay. It's always a transition from talking to reading. I have to sort of... No, nobody laughed. Everyone was thinking, like, yeah, I guess it is. Not that that's a bad thing. Okay, we're on the Queen Isabella, it's the name of the ship, and now we're sort of off into the Pacific Ocean. And again, the Pacific Ocean is an ocean I don't know very well, so I made that up, too. It's my Pacific. Valerie finished her martini. Want to go in the pool and lie on one of those big rafts in our clothes? Why not? I'll leave my phone here. No one will steal it. They arranged themselves head to toe on an empty raft, cradling their drinks. Christine kicked gently against the pool's edge and sent the raft bobbing and floating into the middle. The surface of the water rocked and shimmered. Light from tiki lamps shot upward and dissipated in the still air. There were a few other people dog-paddling with foam noodles, lounging on fat inner tubes, but no one paid attention to them. It was as if they were in a self-contained little bubble, a sanctuary of sorts. Christine lifted her head. Being around Valerie's fast-talking nervous energy made her aware of how slow-installed she had become. She could feel Valerie's brain working now, even when she was silent, the energy of her thoughts running ceaselessly. Christine remembered being that way back in her old life. Now there were whole swaths of time when her thoughts seemed to stop, when action took over completely and she became a functioning machine carrying out her tasks. She thought with an odd unaccustomed longing of her old walk-up apartment in New York on Orchard Street, the sour, feckon smell of the old tenement stairwell. She remembered climbing up the four flights to her apartment's battered front door in stylish leather boots, heavy plastic bags of groceries wrapped around both wrists. It was odd how real it fell to her, more real than the farm, as if her entire life since going back to Maine had been some sort of hallucination. As if she'd never left that life of late nights in bars and reading books on long subway rides and jostling through crowds of varied, interesting people. She hadn't been looking to escape from that life, not consciously, but one fall weekend she had gone up to Maine to visit her parents in Standish and incidentally to interview a farmer friend of theirs named Ed Thorn for a piece she was thinking of writing on the rising popularity of small organic farms in New England. She had driven her mother's old Subaru over to Freiburg on a clear, crisp day to find Ed, heaping a pile of pumpkins into the back of his truck to take to the farmer's market the next morning. As Ed liked to put it, it was love at first question. She sat on his porch all afternoon with him, drinking mead he'd made with honey from his own bees, and then sat all evening at his table eating the dinner he cooked, food he'd raised and grown himself. And then she spent the night with him and the next night too. It was a relief to admit it to herself. She was tired of being broke in debt, stressed out about money and bills, a hustle of freelancing. Six months later, she left New York and moved back up to Maine to live with Ed. The piece never got written. That had been almost eight years ago. Val, she said now, I have to make a decision. Ed wants kids and I don't. Valerie sat up rocking the raft, splashing them both. You never told me that. What do you mean you don't want them? I'm not sure. But don't you need them to collect eggs and harvest stuff and put wood on the fire? Valerie laughed. All I know is Little House on the Prairie. I don't want to turn into a mother, said Christine, my mother. Listen, I get it. I don't want kids either, said Valerie, at all. But if I were married and lived on a farm, I'd totally have them. Sometimes I miss my old life. You never loved New York and you didn't love journalism either. You were good at it, but you always said you hated the bias and slant and trashiness of it all. Maybe so, Christine said. She went silent, let the whole subject go, feeling disappointed and slightly depressed. She had expected Valerie to say something different, had wanted her to even. Someone jumped into the pool near them, water sloshed into Christine's ear, and Jin went up her nose. She coughed. The raft bobbed on the wake, overhead. The Milky Way sprawled across the length of the sky, a violently lavish expanse of light, exactly as it did on clear nights in the sky above the farm. But it looked more dazzling and savage here. Christine felt a burst of wild open excitement. Here she was, drunk on a raft in a pool, on a ship, on a dark ocean, thousands of miles from home, anything was possible. Do you want another swimming scene? Is it making you feel cooler? Oh, you don't have to clap for that. Oh, this is chapter 21, and a lot has changed in the course of the story. I'm not gonna tell you what, but this again is Valerie and Christine swimming. Down in their cabin, Christine put on her green bikini and waited by the open balcony door in the hot breeze, staring at the ocean longingly. While Valerie changed out of her black bikini into a black one piece, and stood looking at herself from various angles in the mirror, changed back into the bikini again, put on lipstick, wiped it off, draped herself in a gauzy sundress, and reapplied her lipstick. They climbed down into the ship's belly. As they went along the B-deck corridor, Christine saw a light ahead and heard voices, muted, almost drowned out by a series of groans and clanks that seemed to come from the ship's frame. As she followed Valerie along the corridor, the smell of old smoke began to dissipate. A stream of fresh air poured toward them. Christine saw daylight ahead, and soon they emerged into a long, narrow room lined with shelves and cabinets and lockers. At the far end, double doors were propped open, leading to stairs down to a small platform extending from the ship's hull, hovering just above the surface of the ocean. A small crowd of people were already there, looking down with excitement at the calm, still, light, dappled water. The air was soft with spray and haze. Look at this, said Theodore to Christine. He gestured outward. It's our new swimming pool, the biggest in the world. I've never swum in the middle of the ocean before, said somebody, said someone nearby, sounding nervous, me neither. This is cool. Theodore was the first to jump in. He cannonballed, went under, and emerged with a roar. His fist raised. It's great he yelled at the people still standing on the dock. Others gamely jumped in with shrieks and splashes. Oh, Jesus, said Valerie. I'm dizzy just thinking about it. Don't think, said Christine. Once we're in, we'll be fine. She held her breath and jumped. Under water, with her eyes shut, she experienced a brief moment of horrified panic, thinking about how deep the water was below her, stretching miles down into the darkness. Then her head bobbed up, and she took a breath, looked around at the sparkling surface of the rocking, gentle bath. She began to move her limbs with pleasure through the salty, sunlit water, cool enough to tingle on her skin. There was a splash beside her, and Valerie was in too. Her hair streaming with seawater, her eyes soft without her glasses. Christine Frog kicked around in a leisurely breaststroke. In the hazy brightness and hot light, she saw bobbing human heads, and above more people on the ship, crowding the upper decks, looking down at the swimmers. She passed a floating plastic bottle, probably thrown overboard than another. She thought of the invisible cloud of trillions of disintegrated plastic microbits interspersed throughout the water, inseparable from it, part of it, like smog and filtering air. She had seen so many online news stories, TV shows, documentaries that cataloged and exposed humanity's unstoppable destruction of the oceans with images of vast gyres of trash, miles-long oil slicks bleached and dying coral reefs, seabird stomachs full of deadly plastic, whales and dolphins entangled in fishing nets, algae blooms. She had absorbed all this information with a sense of helpless grief-sickened rage. It reminded her of reading horror novels as a teenager, unable to look away, sucked in a stifled scream in the pit of her stomach, eyes shocked wide. Hey, Val, she said. Hey, Chris, said Valerie, scissoring her legs and making snow angels with her arms, her hair spreading around her head. I kind of wish I'd brought my shampoo down. My scalp is so itchy. Why did you pick this cruise? What do you mean? Why didn't you take a cruise on a new megaship with Wi-Fi? Valerie did a couple of slow underwater horizontal jumping jacks while she thought about this. She looked like a giant pale smooth starfish. I thought it would be good for me to give up the internet for a while. I was so wrong. Wrong about giving up internet or for picking this cruise. Well, this cruise was obviously a colossally bad choice to put it mildly. But what I really learned is that life without the internet is not very interesting. I just feel like I'm missing out. I'm not in touch. I'm often some slow lane. What's wrong with being online all the time? It's not like anything is happening anywhere else. Take this cruise, string quartets, old people, stuffy food. The library is full of old books no one reads anymore. Christine laughed, Philistine. I am not, said Valerie, but she laughed too. The ocean feels smaller than it used to. Everything feels smaller, doesn't it? Or is it just me? It's just you, said Christine. They were silent a while, suspended there together while tiny waves lapped at their skin. Christine looked up at the Isabella feeling like an explorer or an astronaut who'd left the mothership, ventured away for the first time and was looking back at it from the void of space. Seen from here, the ship looked small and alone, the only shelter and protection for these hundreds of souls who clung to her creaky old frame. But she also looked reassuring, human-scaled in all that depless blue, elegant and starkly white in the sunlight, all her curves and stacked terraced decks soaring above the sea surface. She was aware all of a sudden of music coming from an upper deck of the ship. Two-stringed instruments, it sounded like, playing a fugue-like duet that burst on the still hot air and gusts of notes, liquid and rippling, orderly, resonant, civilized. Well, you're such a wonderful reader. I really enjoyed listening. You do friendship so well. And in this book, there are several layers of friendships among different groups of people. From the start, Christine and, I keep wanting to say Vivian because that was Sarah's character. Oh yeah, that's right. Valerie. Also her name was Melanie in an earlier draft, so. Oh, that's right, yeah. Valerie feels like the main character for such a long time, you know, and that starts to shift. But where did you start? What's the germ for this book? Someone who hates cruise ships? And, you know. Yeah, yeah, I do. It's an interesting question. Was Valerie, who was the character that arrived first? Was it a musician, a cook, a Valerie? No, it was none of them, none of the characters. The book came out of, it came out of an idea that I had years ago to write about a cruise ship because in the early aughts, I had an accountant who was on a cruise and he, I heard from him, I got an email from him saying, I'm sorry, your taxes are gonna be late. There was a norovirus on my cruise and I caught it and I'm really sick and I thought, norovirus cruise ship. I mean, I come from Arizona, I don't know from cruise ships. And so I started thinking about what that must have been like for him and I asked him about it when I went in to meet with him to do my taxes and he said, oh, it was a nightmare, you know? It's like, you think you're on the vacation of a lifetime and then you're quarantined in your tiny cabin, puking your guts out for the rest of the cruise. It's awful and after that, I started the way you notice a word when you learn a word. I started reading stories about cruise ships everywhere and I was riveted to them and I didn't know why. Kind of unaccountably just, you know, about there was a ship that floated off the coast of Mexico a hundred miles from land without any power propulsion. There was an engine room fire. There were no backup generators because the cruise ship company was cutting corners because cruise ships are capitalist money-generating machines so any way you can make more money, you do safety be damned or any way in those days. And so I followed this story just like, like it was a horror story in the news. They had to sleep in tent cities up on the deck. All the passengers brought their sheets and mattresses up and established this sort of like, it looked like a homeless encampment and the crew was making sandwiches with like wilted lettuce and stale bread and that's what they ate. And, you know, there was just bottled water rationed and I thought, God, for five days and they had to wait for tugboats to come and get them. This cruise ship, this enormous floating mega-hotel was just dead in the water. And I was just, I mean, I think that story was the germ of this novel. Like, what is that, it gave me existential chills. It really feels like a simulacrum of, you know, this apocalyptic world we're living in, you know, like, you can do the whole disaster in one compact little universe. Also, I love stories about self-contained systems, human systems, stuck in or moving through a wilderness. I think it's a great premise. I mean, the Odyssey is one. Star Trek, Das Bu, there are so many. And the idea that humans, what happens to a human system or civilization when the shit hits the fan in terms of, like, stuff going, stuff going awry as it does in this book. So I started, so I started thinking about, also, we had moved to Portland, which is a stop on the, you probably all know this, a stop on the cruise ship route up the Eastern seaboard. And so it's like, so we would walk our dog in the Eastern prom and look out and there would be this enormous hulking white cruise ship bigger than our biggest building, I think. A city you will pull up. It's like a city pulling up and then disgorging all these people who infuse all this cash into the local economy and take up all the streets in the old port and then get back on the cruise ship. Use up all the pastel colors. Right, there's no pastel for anyone else. And then off they go again. And it's sort of like this, I just kept thinking, you know, and this is during the run up to the 2016 presidential election. When I'm feeling things kind of going wrong in our country and I had a bad feeling Trump was gonna win and I really wanted to go out. No, why was that a bad feeling? I mean, Bruce and I were coming over the million dollar bridge and there's the cruise ship going out, you know. It's enormous, these things. And they're kind of fascinating. I mean. Yeah, I think you used it. It was like, it feels symbolic but that goes away quickly but the metaphor is always kind of available and the book becomes sort of surprisingly in a way but it's political in all kinds of angles because you have the Israeli musicians, you've got the people below ships, all the people of color are below ships, you know. And they're having their own stresses and then. That's where the characters came from because once you have a cruise ship, you have to populate it. And I did a lot of research because I haven't been on a cruise. You started with a cruise ship. I started with the idea of a cruise ship and I started with the idea of this sort of microcosm for I wanted to write about America and I wanted to write about capitalism and sort of all these things that I was really engaged with thinking about. But I wanted it to be a story because it's not like a novelism of treatise. So I needed people. So what about capitalism? Well, so I feel like, I mean I kind of touch on it in that scene I read of them swimming about the ship but I feel like a cruise ship is a money generating machine. It's like a capitalist, it's like a symbol of, I mean it's the perfect symbol of capitalism. It exists without any kind of checks and balances because there are no real regulations or laws on the high seas. All kinds of crimes happen on them that aren't prosecuted because you can't. They discharge tremendous amounts of waste and exhaust and use a huge amount of fuel without any kind of, but they're making money, so that's okay. And I love the way you make it the last cruise of a old, beautiful old ship that's gonna be retired. That's the last cruise. That's because I feel nostalgic. Arly, but also it's kind of the wreckage of capitalism too, right? And then one of the characters on the boat is the owner of the ship. There's a billionaire on board. And of course, he's not gonna share the fate of some of the others. No he isn't, because he doesn't have to. And that came out of thinking about, well all the billionaires, what are they doing right now? They don't care about the environment. Sorry if any of you are billionaires, but you should care. They're building bunkers. They're gonna hide when everything goes, when the rest of us are frying out here, they're gonna go into their bunkers. I went to Louis the 14th. Yeah. I don't think so. That's a good point. Yeah, someone has to keep those bunkers going. That's true. And they're not gonna keep those bunkers going. All those hard-working underpaid people. No they're not. They're pissed off. But all that aside, it's a beautiful day here in Portland, man. Pastel afternoon. All right, so you know, yeah. Okay, but can I just say, I wanted this book to be fun to read. It is fun. That's what I was kind of moved to that. I didn't wanna write a heavy book about America. And that's where the friendship comes in. There's a beautiful love story that blew me away. I love that, and I don't wanna say too much, but just to have elderly, old friends, decide, you know what? I say as much as I'll say. And... I know, I love that. I love that a lot. I love the people. And I love the way the musicians, their relationship has to do with music a lot. And they've been doing this together for so long that the only way they can communicate almost is through these concherti and stuff that they're working on. Or not the only way, but it's fascinating what you do with the people. And you quickly forget that this is some kind of symbol of capital. Good, I'm glad. But deep underneath, that's always thrumming, you know? Like the engine of, oh, I don't know, like a... I just can't come up with a metaphor. Okay, so I wanna go back quickly to... Now you've had quite a few books by now, and I wanna get a sense of how they lead to this book. So I can't list them in order, but The Last Man I Adored. There's also two threads. There's non-fiction thread and there's the fiction thread too. I think this novel is a departure for me. It felt different from... My other books are sort of, you know, they're really about failure, I think. I was, because I had experiences with failure before I published my book, I feel like failure is a really interesting thing to write about. And there are a lot, you know, there are about people in New York and groups like systems of people and power between people and like dark comedies, but really generated by... Well, I think it's important to say the dark comedy part because you don't read it and feel depressed by failure. No, you shouldn't. I think failure is a very cheerful thing. And what would you say this one's about, the one word? In one word? Yeah. I think you did it. You just said it to me this one. I'm trying to remember what you said. What did I say? Ah. It's hanging in the air. It's too hot to think. No, but it's about... I don't know. To me it's about the ends of things, you know? Yes. Well, so I feel like it's... Oh, I know. There is no, you know, it is a disaster. Nature wins. Nature wins. That says it should be. Nature always wins. That's a good... But that's not a conventional way to look at it because usually in this kind of book, it's about humans overcoming nature and it's about our ability to sort of overcome anything. The civilized system, even though it breaks down or whatever, there's usually some sort of triumph at the end. But I don't really believe that anymore. I think a lot of novels are starting to end with trouble. So... How about writing? What's life like as a writer now? Is it changing? Yeah, it's changing. I feel like people really used to read novels. And think about them and want novels to be sort of textured and disturbing even. But I feel like now people are turning to novels for comfort before anything else. And so to write something that doesn't offer that is a risk and a problem and vexing, I think, to a large group of the readership. I think people really want safety and entertainment and coziness and answers. Entertainment's our job, really. You know, we deny that at our peril. So how was your tour with this book? How did it feel out there in America? It felt... Well, you know, I was... Here's where I went on my tour. Taos, New Mexico, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Northampton, Massachusetts. So I feel like I... Odyssey. No, I didn't. I went to this amazing, it's called the Book Mill in Montague, actually. I don't know that one. Well, keep going, sorry. Bookstore. It felt good. Okay. It was nice. There's something despite all the... People are still reading. The disasters we are... I just feel like I'm walking around in a disaster and yet then I go outside and it's like, oh, it's a beautiful day. It's amazing. I know. I know, figure this out. Cognitive dissonance. Well, do you want to take a question or two? Sure. And thank you so much. You're just so interesting to think about this long love from age six of writing and of curious relationships and how they come together and recombinate. Anyone have a question? Does anyone have an answer? I know. The Iowa workshop is where you talk to her. She takes a place. Did you carry any of that in your writing? I don't know if you did say, did you start with writing, but you can't again as a person. But was there anything you got that contributed to your talk with her? Did you all hear the question about the Iowa Writers Workshop? Did I get anything out of it, basically? Well, I went back to teach there about three and a half years ago and it had changed so much. And it wasn't until then, until I went back and I was terrified to teach there, but we bought an old house and we needed the money because we have to renovate it, so I took the job. And so I lived back in Iowa City for three months and I realized what an amazing thing it is to be a young writer, even if you're terrified and even if it's competitive and even if there's bloodshed every day on the floor of the workshop. There is a sense of taking yourself seriously that I saw in my students, too. And the fact that you have this time to write, I had two years to write in my 20s. I didn't have to do anything else. And I feel like what it instilled in me was a sense of taking writing seriously in the sense of doing it every day and treating it like a job. So discipline, I think, is what I got out of it. And it's the best thing you can have as a writer, I think. Other people seem to be able to have it without needing to go to Iowa, but. Genevieve. I'm wondering if, as you said, with your previous fiction books, they were more about New York and the bubble that you were living in New York and then each one writing a memoir, two memoirs, nonfiction. And then in the process of the writing of your memoirs, in other words, writing a memoir and then looking at it at home, give you the courage to move forward in your fiction into this larger scale, larger scale. Yes. That is. Yes. Well, I think in my early novels, that's a wonderful question, Genevieve, who was the editor of one of my memoirs. I think that in my early novels, I was working stuff out in my own life and there was a kind of autobiographical component to every single one of them. And there were all these questions I was asking about where I came from, my past, and sort of the way we do in maybe our early work as novelists, but this book wasn't that at all. And I think having written my actual life, the autobiography of my, you know, it felt necessary, it was like a purging. And I don't feel at all interested in myself as a subject and at all anymore. So, yeah. How many novels did you write before you got un-published? Well, there was Life Can't Be a Penguin. In The Drink was my first novel. I was trying to write a different book at Iowa, which was this very Falknerian book set in Arizona about two girls growing up in a trailer. And again, I was trying to be a kind of writer I wasn't and so it never, I'd never got beyond the third chapter of it and that was my thesis. So In The Drink was really my first novel. I don't have any novels in drawers. But I feel like In The Drink took me 10 years to write and so it was teaching myself how to write a novel with draft after draft. I found a writing group. I gave it to everyone who would read it. I walked around thinking about it. I kept notes. It was this decade of obsessive sort of drawing on every book I'd ever read, every novel I'd loved. All the lessons of the readers who, I mean the writers that I read, you know, coming up, especially the mid-20th century British female sort of like Penelope Fitzgerald and Margaret Drabble and these writers who did incisive sort of psychological ironic and with a shade toward darkness writing that I wasn't seeing anywhere in this country and I wasn't reading it among my contemporaries and so I felt like I was trying to do this thing that was out of fashion and that I didn't think anyone else really cared about but I cared about it with my whole heart and soul. This was what I wanted to do and the kind of writer I wanted to be. So I feel like that first novel was me sort of claiming my territory in spite of fashion, in spite of what anyone wanted and it was rejected by every editor in New York. I think 27 rejections before someone finally agreed to publish it and even then it was in trouble because they weren't gonna bring it out in paperback. They didn't know what to do with me. I was sort of this anomalous like, they thought I was chick lit because that was in fashion at the time but I wasn't, I mean I didn't sell like a chick lit writer, right? So this one novel was sort of my crucible, my proving ground, my training ground and I never went away from that way of writing. It's the only way I can write and we all as writers can only write the way we write. It's really, really, really stirring, you know? It's so good and I feel so lucky to have been part of this process along the way and learn so much from watching you piece together your ideas and walk away from missteps and ignore my bad advice. He said, more bloodshed, you don't give bad advice. You have to kill off the pastel people. And then to read it one more time and just find, I can forget all that work that I saw happening and now here's the object and it's perfect and thanks for having me today and thanks for being here. Thank you and I just wanna say the thing I love about living in, one of my favorite things about living in Portland is that I have friends who are writers who I love, whose work I love and I see you in the audience and like, this town is great for writers. It's just an amazing place to live and I'm so happy I moved here. Anyway, thank you all for coming. Thanks to the library. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.