 Okay, good evening, and thank you for joining us here at the Mechanics Institute. I'm Laura Shepard. I'm Director of Events, and we're very pleased to welcome you to our kickoff event for Litquake, fiction, first fiction, Ties that Bind. Of course, we've been a partner with Litquake from the very beginning, and we have a wonderful array of events that are coming up, which I'll give you a little rundown in a minute. But first, I'd like to invite those of you who are new to our Institute to come on Wednesday for our free tour. Wednesday at noon, librarians will take you through our vast and beautiful General Interest Library, which is on the second and third floors. You'll see our International Chess Club, which is right down the hallway. And you'll get an introduction to our incredible history, starting in 1854, and also get an introduction to the various programs and activities that happen here. We have writers' groups. We have our author programs, panel discussions on topical issues, a Friday night cinema lit film series, and of course the chess club has ongoing tournaments and classes for chess players of all ages and backgrounds. And we have all this happening under one roof, seven days a week. So we really hope that you'll take a tour of the library and our Institute, you'll find out about us and join, become a member, and be part of our ever-growing literary and cultural community here at 57th Post Street. I also want to make mention about the upcoming Litquake events. Tomorrow, Wednesday, we have a literary lunch, the world of Elena Ferrante with Professor Sarah Maranelli. Then in the evening on Wednesday, October 11th at 6.30, Maximum Punch, Minimum Words, the short story, the short fiction of Barry Gifford, of who we know well here, who'll be in conversation with author Tom Barbash. And then on Thursday again, we'll have a literary lunch, that's at 12.30. It's about Jane Eyre, who turns 170, with Amaleri Ortberg. In the evening on Thursday, October 12th at 6.30, we have a panel discussion, Gotta Get Outta Here, Why We Love Science, Fiction, and Fantasy, with Nick Canis, Meg Ellison, Jonathan Keats, Pat Murphy, and Moderated by Ransom Stevens. So we hope you'll join us for that program as well. And then to cap the whole week, we have a program with author Eric Wax, who's coming up from Hollywood for his new book about the art and process of screenwriting of Woody Allen. And that program will be moderated by film critic David Thompson. So we do hope you'll join us for some of our upcoming programs this week. Also next week, we have The Future of Housing in San Francisco, that's on October 18th. You can see our website and join us for programs. And now I'd like to introduce David Morris, who will be introducing our program. David. Thank you so much, Laura. I'm David Morris from the Litquake Committee. I want to thank you all for coming. This is Litquake's 18th Festival. We are also a resident here, very happily so of the Mechanics Institute. Our offices are just upstairs. And thanks for coming to, you know, First Fiction, The Ties That Bind. This is where we're going to have a panel discussion here with two critically acclaimed first-time authors. Our Litquake Festival began last Thursday. It continues through this coming Saturday. Through the course of our festival, we have about 850 authors. So there are events every day. There are programs at the door. If you want to take one, please feel free to do so. It's a little difficult to keep track if you don't have a program. Or you can look us up on litquake.org. It all culminates Saturday night, this coming Saturday night, down in the Mission District, with 102 different venues spread over three different phases in four hours. And so you have an incredible choice of over 30 per hour of different events that you can attend. It's really something that's become quite a San Francisco event. I have put out some surveys in your chairs. Please don't be afraid of them. Our grant givers definitely want to know who attends our events. So that would be tremendously helpful to us if you could fill those out. Speaking of our sponsors, very important to thank them publicly. They would be the Grants for the Arts, the Minor Anderson Family Foundation, Margaret and William R. Hurst, the Third Foundation, the Jack and Rose Oman Foundation, the Craig Newmark Foundation, California Arts Council, Walter and Elise Haas Fund, and our media sponsors, San Francisco Chronicle, KALW, KQED, 7x7, Johnny Funcheep, Bartab, and 48 Hills. I also want to remind you that 85% of our events are free to the public, especially the crawl that I mentioned on Saturday night are all completely free. So if you believe in keeping literature a key component of the city's cultural landscape, please support us. We do accept donations, of course. We've gone a little bit high-tech. You can reach us on Venmo. You just type in at Lidquake, PayPal, info at Lidquake.org, or on our website, Lidquake.org. I would like to introduce our fabulous panel. Tonight, our first-time authors are, first, to your right, Rachel Kong. Rachel grew up in Southern California and holds degrees from Yale University and the University of Florida. From 2011 to 2016, she was the managing editor and executive editor of Lucky Peach Magazine. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Tin House, Joyland, American Short Fiction, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Believer, and California Sunday. She lives right here in San Francisco. Her first novel is Goodbye, Vitamin. In our center here, we're pleased to have Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, born and raised in New Orleans, another one of my favorite cities, where she studied creative writing, well, excuse not there, but she studied creative writing at Dartmouth and Law at UC Berkeley. A recipient of the Lombard Fellowship, she spent a year in the Dominican Republic working for a civil rights organization and pursuing her writing. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcar Prize and her stories have been published or are forthcoming in the Massachusetts Review, Grace Barrow Journal, Limestone Journal, and Broad Magazine. She lives right here in the Bay Area. Her debut novel is a kind of freedom. Our moderator this evening, to your far left, will be Megan Ward. She is the author of Runway, Confessions of a Not-So Supermodel, a chronicle of six years spent working as a high-fashion model in Paris, London, Tokyo, and Milan. She's also a freelance writer whose work has appeared mostly in The Rumpus, San Francisco Magazine, 7x7, and in the anthologies It's So You, 35 Women Write About Personal Expression Through Fashion and Style, and Wake Up and Smell the Shit, Hilarious Travel Disasters. Thank you, and Megan, please take it away. Thank you. Well, I'm honored to be here tonight with these fantastic authors. Both of their books are amazing and you should buy them both and get them signed tonight. Go home and read them right away. A quote about Margaret's book, A Kind of Freedom, this luminous and assured first novel shines an unflinching, compassionate light on three generations of a black family in New Orleans, emphasizing endurance more than damage. So first I'd like to ask Margaret to read a passage from A Kind of Freedom. Sure. I'll read from the first chapter. And as some of you may know, the book takes place in three generations, spanning World War II to post-Katrina. And the sections weave in and out of each other, so there would be a section from World War II, and then it would go into the 80s and then post-Katrina. And the section I'll read from first is from the winter of 1944. Evelyn. Winter, 1944. Later Evelyn would look back and remember that she wasn't the one who noticed Renard first. No, it was her sister Ruby who caught the too short right hem of his suit pants in her side view. Ruby was thicker than Evelyn, not fat by a long shot, but thick in a way that prevented her from ever feeling comfortable eating. Her favorite food was red beans and rice and Monday was hard on her. Their mother would boil a big pot and feel relieved. Two pounds plenty to feed the family for at least three days, but Ruby felt taunted by the surplus. She'd cut in and out of the kitchen the beginning of the week, sneaking deep bowls of rice and applying as little gravy as she could to maintain the flavor but not alert her family to her excess. Then on Thursday she'd examine the consequences. It would start in the morning on the way into school. Ruby attended vocational school and Evelyn attended Dillard University, but their campuses were only a few blocks apart and they walked the majority of the way together. My thighs are touching, Ruby would say, as if they just started touching the minute before. You can't see it though, Evelyn would assure her. Her own legs so far apart another leg could fit between them. Who are you fooling with? You can't see it. Anybody with eyes could see it. You don't even need to have eyes, you just need ears and you could hear my thighs swishing together. You can't hear anything so soft, Evelyn would go on and she'd spend the rest of the day wading through that topic. Just when she'd think she got to flat land, Ruby would pull her back into the merc with a question about her behind. Matters would improve a little on Friday, but Ruby would maintain an edge around her even then and everyone near her felt the prick. Today was a Friday. His pants legs are uneven, Ruby said, but the new boy is standing on North Claybourne in Esplanade wearing a brown wool suit, a gray v-neck sweater beneath the jacket. He stood next to Andrew, whom all the girls fond over at the debutante ball last season. Evelyn's own escort had been second in charm. He had even silenced her nerves by pointing out his friend's waltzing mishaps, but despite her mother's urgings she hadn't accepted his visit and a week later when his interest subsided she couldn't help but sigh. She looked up now, exhaled the smoke of the cigarette dangling from her fingers. It was still early February and the winter air hadn't lost its chill. Still all the seventh ward girls congregated after school outside Dufon's Oyster Shop, the best Negro owned restaurant in the city, and smoked. Evelyn had come to relish the anticipation of the first slight inhale. She was a lady and the long release afterward, she would never have referred to herself as an anxious person. Ruby had claimed that role in the family, but any nerves that jingled inside her settled at just the thought of a drag. She blew the smoke out of the side of her mouth so as not to hit her sister and smiled at the thought of the uneven him. Maybe he was in a rush. Even still Ruby said, breathing in so sharply she almost made herself choke. He might have found time to even out his pants hymns. He laughed. Cute though. Too brown for most people, but it is a nice shade of brown. Evelyn nodded. Cute he was. Men and women rushed past them, bustling in and out of offices and stores, the boot seat and feed, Queen of the South Coffee, Miller Funeral Home, Maryweather's Photography, Beijoie Cut Rate Pharmacy, the Sweet Tooth Ice Cream Parlor and Fine Time Billiard Hall. The outdoor market where Evelyn's mother made groceries was just a block away at St. Bernard Avenue and Evelyn could smell the Cajun spices simmering. The butcher let out a high pitched call, veiled to roast and cabbage and green beans. Ruby raised her voice to combat the new noise and his hair lay so flat and that's not a conch either. The uneven man looked over at the girls then and Evelyn held his gaze for less than a second. So quick if he doubted it had happened he could convince himself it hadn't. She shook her head back at her sister. No, much more natural looking than a conch. All that but he couldn't hem the pants evenly. I wouldn't have ever noticed those pants if you hadn't hit me over the head with it, Ruby, Evelyn said, though it wasn't true. It was clear that despite his press suit and neat tie the uneven man didn't belong among the passe blancs he stood with. No, not with their damn near white skin, straight black hair and even straighter noses, their mustaches like silk against their lips and she didn't know what possessed her to declare otherwise. She liked what she'd said though. Not only that but the fact that she said it and for the rest of the day whenever she thought of the uneven man she thought of the weight of her voice when it came out firm. Okay. Goodbye, vitamin. Is a quietly brilliant disquisition on family relationships and adulthood told in prose that is so startling the spare beauty that I find myself thinking about how Kong's turns of phrases, I found myself thinking about Kong's turns of phrases for days after I finished reading. Rachel, could you read a passage for us? Sure, yeah, I'm also just going to read from the beginning of the book. December 26th. Tonight a man found dad's pants in a tree lit with Christmas lights. The stranger called and said, belonging to a Howard young? Well, shit, I said. I put the phone down to verify that dad was home and had pants on. He was and did. Yesterday on mom's orders I'd written his name and our number in permanent marker onto the tags of all his clothes. Apparently what he's done in protest is pitched the numbered clothing into trees. Up and down Euclid his slacks and shirts hang from the branches. The downtown trees have their holiday lights in them and this man who called had while driving noticed the clothes illuminated. December 27th. In the morning when I go to fetch them city workers are removing the lights from the trees and the decorative bows from the lampposts. One man unties a bow and tosses it to his partner on the ground. All the great bright gold bows are piled in the bed of an enormous pickup truck parked in the plaza. In that same plaza a frustrated man is saying to his dog, why are you being this way? A baby in a stroller is wearing sunglasses. Dad all my hard work I say later at home I've collected a pair of pants, two shirts, a few knotted up ties. Now that's unnecessary, dad says angrily when I return them. I got here on Christmas Eve. I'm home for the holidays like you're supposed to be. It's the first time in a long time. Under ordinary circumstances the circumstances that had become ordinary. I would have gone to Joel's. His mother would have popped popcorn for garlands and his father would have baked a stolen. His twin brother would have hit on me. In the bathroom there would have been a new grocery brand toothbrush with a gift label on it. My name and his mother's handwriting. Ruth. This year with nowhere to go no Joel and no Charleston I made the drive down. It's been three or four Christmases away. From San Francisco where I live it would have been an easy six hours south. Up to you Joel would say but I always choose Charleston. Merry Christmas we tell our parents my parents over speakerphone. Christmas morning dad pulled out a small worn red notebook. He explained he's kept it since I was very little. Inside there are letters to me. He'd been waiting for the proper time to share them but it had slipped his mind when you know until now he showed me a page from this notebook. Today you asked me where metal comes from. You asked me what flavor are germs. You were distressed because your pair of gloves had gone missing. When I asked you for a description you said they were sort of shaped like my hands. Then he closed the notebook very suddenly and said as though angry that's enough. December 29th now mom is asking if I could stay a while to keep an extra eye on things. Things she means dad whose mind is not what it used to be. It comes as a surprise. Things aren't so bad dad doesn't seem any different on top of which my mother hates to ask for anything. Just the year mom repeats when I can't manage to answer. Think about it. On the way to my on the way to the bathroom I catch my mother shouting no no no you're expensive to a vitamin she's dropped. Ginkgo I think. The first thing started approximately last year. Dad forgetting his wallet for getting faces for getting to turn the faucet off. Then it was bumping into things and feeling tired even after full nights of sleep. That he'd been a drinker Dr. Lung said didn't help. There is presently no single test or scan that can diagnose dementia with complete accuracy. It's only after the person is dead that you can cut his or her brain open and look for telltale plaques and tangles. For now it's process of elimination. What we have are tests that rule out other possible causes of memory loss. In diagnosing Alzheimer's doctors can only tell you everything that it isn't. What my father doesn't have. Hyperthyroidism, a kidney or liver disorder, an infection, a nutritional deficiency. Deficiencies of vitamin B12 and folic acid can cause memory loss and are treatable. I'm just straight up demented dad says. Thank you. Since the name of our panel is the ties that bind, I want to start by talking about family and what role family plays in each of your novels. Both books have daughters who have riffs with their fathers. I wanted to ask you about why did you choose to focus on the father-daughter relationships more than the mother-daughter relationships? Margaret? That's a good question. I think for instance in the first section, the Evelyn section, it wasn't a conscious choice but because of the dichotomy that I wanted to set up in the book which was that there was this path of progression and then there was this path of regression and at least seemingly and the main character, Evelyn had to choose which one to go down and because her father was the symbol of progression, this educated doctor in the 40s, this educated African-American doctor which was so unusual at that time for historic reasons but because he was the symbol of stability and even progression in the book and she had to make a decision between progression and what felt like it would look like regression, she had to go against her father. And so it wasn't so much that I consciously chose to have that relationship fleshed out more because she did have conflict with her mother too, it was just that one of the central themes of this book was what constitutes moving forward and what constitutes staying still or moving backward and what decisions lead to which path and also who can afford to take chances that might lead to regression. So you have someone in the 40s, Evelyn's character who's African-American and she's a woman and she's in the height of Jim Crow and she can't afford to make a decision based on love that might hold her back and so that was more what I was getting at there and even in the next section with Jackie where there's a rift between the daughter and the father, it was a symbol of the rift between progress and what might have looked like staying still. Yeah, I think for me also, I mean it wasn't, it's hard to answer that question a little bit because it wasn't so much a conscious choice, it was, I think, the family kind of exploring the family and the relationships in that family were how the characters really came to be and so I think sometimes in families there are alliances that happen maybe and so in the book, the main character Ruth, she's sort of allied with her father and the mother has more of a relationship with Ruth's brother and so there are these pairings that happen, I think in families kind of naturally for whatever reasons, they are probably reasons as mysterious as why I decided to focus on the father but I did know that I wanted, like Margaret said, the father's I think profession was crucial to the book. I was also interested in the way that the mother's character in my book was sort of off to the side, she had been for many years the caretaker in all sorts of ways and the more accommodating one, which I think is a role that women often find themselves in and so I was interested in having this narrator come home ostensibly for the reason of taking care of her father and then realizing in that process how much her mother had also been wronged in many ways. Okay and in Goodbye Vitamin, Goodbye Vitamin is much about reconnecting with families so Ruth, when she comes home, it's been several years since she's come home, her mother says, why didn't you ever come? So is this story about redemption or forgiveness? I think it's about, so it spans a year, I think there's a lot that is complicated about families that cannot be fixed in a single year. I don't think it's quite about redemption completely but I think the characters in the book do make steps toward that and toward forgiving one another for various things. Yeah. You think it's Ruth Moore who's seeking redemption or the father or forgiveness? I think that, so I think that Ruth is a character in the book who is moving home in part for this kind of noble reason of taking care of her father but also mostly because she doesn't know what to do next and she's not quite figured out what her life should be or should look like and so I think that for all of the characters in the book who are sort of just bumbling around, there's no goal for them, they're not quite sure what they should be seeking or they know in general that they should be better people to one another, I think. Okay, and speaking of bumbling around, Margaret, in your book, the characters are largely bumbling around, they're failing in a lot of ways. You know, they make a lot of promises that they don't keep. Bernard promises he'll go to med school, Terry promises he'll quit doing drugs, TC promises he's not going to deal drugs anymore. Are these characters, are they heroes, are they failures? How would you classify them? Well, I think they're just human. You know, I think they're both, they obviously fail and you brought up very crucial ways in which they fail and you're right, they do. But it's funny, before you mentioned the examples, I was thinking, are they failures? I had it across my mind, but you're right, I mean they do fail in these major ways but I just thought of them as human, especially characters like Terry, who's struggling with addiction and a victim of the mishandling of the crack epidemic in the 80s, in my opinion, and especially TC, who's a symbol of the problem of mass incarceration in the country and especially Bernard, who wants to be a doctor and who, in another demographic, would have been very well set up to be a doctor, but it's the 40s and, you know, like I said, it's the height of Jim Crow. There are personal failings there, but they're compounded by the systemic failures, which are, of course, making it harder for these humans to succeed against all odds. And so, you know, when I was writing it, I wasn't, you know, I wasn't trying to make them these people who didn't fail at all to symbolize the grave failures in this country. I wasn't trying to do that because it's not really the human situation. I mean, when you look at the human situation, you have personal contributions that you've made to failings in your life and then you have external factors that have contributed to failings in your life and that's just what it is, it's both. But what I am trying to say is some demographics seem to have more leeway and it's not just race, it's class as well and some demographics have more leeway with mistakes and so I wanted to depict that and I also wanted to show in the combination of their heroics and their failings I wanted to show them as people so, you know, the reader could imagine themselves as these characters and imagine what it might be like with their restrictions or just see them in a way that would make them independent from the stereotypes that some of these groups often fall into. Okay, so while we're on the topic of race, I wanted to ask both of you what role race plays in your book. So yours, like you mentioned, begins with 1944 Jim Crow era in the South and then takes us all the way through post-Katrina in 2010 and ironically, you know, things haven't improved for these, you imagine, progress throughout the generations and things seem to just keep getting worse and worse for this family, the protagonist's father is a doctor and things kind of go downhill from there so could you tell us about what role race plays in your book and racism? Well, you know, I think it's very subtle like I think my hope is that the reader reading the book isn't going to feel bogged down by a sermon on race or a lecture on race. I think my hope is that, you know, you read the book and you think you're reading about a family and you're reading about siblings, relationships with each other and like you said, a daughter's relationship with her father and so that's my hope but beneath it I do have a message like I have a thesis and I do want to say that in some ways racism in this country despite the obvious progress the country has made around race in many ways there are still some pockets of the African-American community that are as limited as African-Americans were under the Jim Crow South regime and so I did want to point that out and that's why it does look like there's a decline even though it's very ironic, it's not one you would expect but in this book with this family there is a decline you start out with a man in the 40s who's a doctor and his family is the wealthiest one on the block and they do very well and they're very stable and they really don't have much interaction with the white world it's a very sheltered life that they live in this largely African-American Creole community and then as things progress you just see that this main character Evelyn her grandson is doing markedly worse than she was doing and it's totally unexpected but it is the way that I wanted to show that in many ways things have gotten worse and there have been systemic replacements for Jim Crow that have sprung up to do the work that Jim Crow was doing Great and Rachel what about you so your protagonist Ruth is half Chinese and half white, her mother's Chinese and then her best friend I think is half Armenian I think that in my book races, I don't know it doesn't play a huge role in it I think that that was partly out of fear and inability like I was writing a book for the first speaking of first novels I was writing a book for the first time trying to figure out how to write a book there are so many things that I wanted to write about and talk about and I almost felt like when I was putting together this family I almost felt like if I made the family Chinese which is what my family is the book would be so long there would be so many things to explain to people who don't know what being a Chinese family is all about and so I almost just wanted to avoid it at the same time I didn't feel like that was totally right either so what happened in the book is that the mother Ruth's mother is an adopted has been adopted into a white family and race does not play a huge role but the main character is mixed race and I think that the ways in which they approach the world and maybe feel a little bit insecure in the world is reflective of some of my own experiences but I think that I did feel it was such a huge thing and I didn't want to not address it properly but I think that something new I'm writing a lot more about race and about identity and it feels like that's something that's central to this next project for this one I wanted to talk about memory and I wanted to talk about family and had I been a second time novelist maybe I would have known how to weave all those things together but I think that I was like what the hell am I even doing like I can't write a book let alone write a book about a minority in this country okay so speaking of memory memory plays a very important role in your book but especially in yours and the obvious way is that Howard the dad is losing his memory but also in the written records that both Howard and Ruth keep so Ruth's entire book is a written record it's her diary of that year she also quotes her father's notes about things that she did when she was a kid and there's a turning point in the book where she begins writing notes to her father could you talk a little bit about the role memory plays sure I mean I think it's probably the biggest role in the book and that was really just thinking about as I was writing it I was really interested in you know I think the father has the father's Alzheimer's diagnosis is a very like obvious and pointed way in which memory is present in the book and the reason that the characters are all thinking about it but I did want to explore to just the ways in which memory is just like the stuff that we all have to make sense of relationships we have with one another and also just our own narratives in our own lives and I have always been really kind of obsessed with memory as just a really imperfect medium for doing that right and I think even writing itself is a way to try to fight against it even though like when you write things down you're almost like committing things to memory in a very specific way too like there's a way in which writing itself is very flawed because it's only making a note of specific and certain things and so I was just interested in looking at memory in a few different ways like through this very specific disease but also just in these really small misunderstandings between people and just the ways in which we're flawed medium and yet this is like what we have as humans to work with really okay Margaret what about you do you feel memory played a role in your book too? hmm bigger bigger scale yeah that's right I mean the legacy of racism I guess but I love that a little bit well so your book is both of you have very non-traditional structures to your book so yours follows three different characters from three different generations and it alternates back and forth between the different characters how did you come up with that structure did it happen sort of organically as you were writing or did you plan that out ahead of time? yeah I always I mean it happened organically and it was planned I always knew it would end with the earliest section and I suspected it would alternate back and forth although at one point I considered doing blocks like I considered doing the post Katrina section first and then the 80 section and then the 40 section as blocks so that you wouldn't you know so that you would read it just one story all the way through and the next story all the way through and you wouldn't alternate back and forth I well I'll speak to why I decided to end it with the early part I just thought the gravity of the of the situation that this family is in in the sense that they're experiencing this drastic decline and much of that is due to systemic factors I thought the gravity of that would hit the reader really hard if you end it on this really positive note in a really early period where the characters themselves are full of hope but they're full of hope and yet as the reader you know that there's not much that's coming that's positive for them that the highlight of their lives is really behind them so I thought that would really hit a chord emotionally but it also what I've learned is it not only does that but it also I think makes the book palatable in a way because I think it's hard to read a book that's all sadness and all depression and all going downhill you have to have some life in it it's like one of my teachers told me you can't write about sadness you can't write about sadness and really like convey that emotion unless there's joy in the pages too you have to have both chords hitting or the gravity of the sadness won't be it won't be felt but so here you know what I learned is that ending on that positive note really I think it really it it gave the like people have said that the book is you know it's obviously about a decline and it's obviously about systemic failures but there's also a streak of endurance and resilience in it and I think that's why I think it's because I ended with the positive note and then also throughout the book you just have these families interspersing and you just have you know relationships between siblings and you have like ordinary life going on people falling in love you know basically it's three love stories and I think I think that you know makes it more mixed and more tolerable because it is a heavy book now you were asking about I think I kind of read around memory okay yeah if you have anything to add about not now I mean it might come to me in a little bit but I don't because the funny thing about this book is although it takes place in three generations that the characters aren't you know that as the reader but the characters don't so they're not thinking oh I remember Jim Crow south when you know they used to tell me you get off the sidewalk you know it's not really happening that way it's like the reader is remembering but the characters really aren't and I think that's interesting too I mean that's really interesting in books I think just that you can mess with time in this crazy way right so yeah readers can remember decades and hundreds of years and that the individuals within that story can't really so in Rachel so the structure of your book again is format of a diary did you come up with that idea before you started writing or was that yeah I mean I thought yeah I didn't really think of it as a diary they're dated entries I guess you know if I I was thinking them more as just first person little snippets from days it's formatted it basically takes place over the course of one year and it's kind of fragmented and it flashes in and out of like main plot developments I guess it's a lot of just Ruth's observations about day-to-day things and I think that was always something that I was interested in again just with the memory just like what we do write down what we commit to paper and also what gets written down in books I guess I think I was interested in writing down the things that get left out of like the big sweeping stories about our lives you know say you're telling somebody your life story at a campfire you wouldn't necessarily say like and then on Monday I dug some hair out of a bathroom sink and yet like that's the sort of thing that is in the book it's really exciting I promise but you know like I think that I was really interested in just those little moments that get left out and yet are the stuff that makes up our lives yeah I mean your book is full of these observations that are hilarious and there are things that I've never noticed in life and so it made me wonder you know are these things that you know like do you you know walk around with a notebook and write down these weird observations or do you just invent them all I always tell myself to be better about writing things down sometimes I feel like I don't write enough things down as a writer they're very funny well so and speaking of humor you know you said you can't have the sadness without the joy so you know it's very funny but it really also is a very sad story about his father suffering from Alzheimer's so how did you you know balance that humor with the sadness I'm totally with Margaret on that it's you know it's I think I'm not that interested in reading a story that's all sad or all funny you know like I think that life isn't that way and that I mean is that I don't know is that why it's like you're always crying on airplanes is because like I don't know it just I think that when something is when you read something that's funny and then maybe a page later it's devastating like that those are the books that stick with me the most and that I think affect me the most and so I was interested in recreating that but also again like with these details from life and wanting to make it a book that reflected life I knew that it would have to involve sadness and humor hand in hand I think you know if you go to a funeral people still make jokes you know it's really really sad but you do have to kind of make jokes to cope or to even just remember the life of the person that you know you're there to celebrate yeah I I've read her book so I that really resonated with me that there was so much vibrancy and humor and love that was coming out of this very sad story and I thought the balance was perfect and it reminded me of you know because I've been in and out of the hospital with my father and for instance last year we went eight times in a year because he'd been sick and my husband and I always say man that was a great year even though we were all you know we were in the hospital we bonded with our family we were we just you know I went to so many family birthday parties for instance because I was there so much and you do you just laugh because you're just sitting there I mean we spent so much time laughing I really resonated with me and I really thought that was true to life the way you balance those two I'm going to ask you a couple more questions and then we'll hand it over to the audience so setting yours is in L.A. and yours takes place in New Orleans do you think that the stuff in your book is so specific to New Orleans you have the Creole X the Creole dialect from Evelyn's mother and references to Katrina do you think that your story could have taken place anywhere other than New Orleans I don't I think this book definitely had to happen in New Orleans one of the reasons and I always say this is because in order to see a decline like that from a very stable you know well to do family in the 40s to a family that's you know living paycheck to paycheck in 2010 it's unusual for that to happen in a black family in this country because of what we know about history there just wasn't that much influence in that demographic in the 40s but in New Orleans there was because of the French influence and because of the population of Creoles and how much access they had to property etc you did see families who were doing okay doing really well and so for that decline to even be realistic it had to come out of a city like New Orleans there are other cities too but New Orleans is one of the only ones and then also I just think the book because we have Katrina I mean there's there aren't many other cities where you could have that of course but then it was just I don't know it was such a gift to be able to write about New Orleans because you have the flavors of the foods you have the music you have the dialect as you said and it's just it really imbues the work with so much texture that you don't have to work that hard to achieve it's just there and I'm writing a book now that doesn't take place in New Orleans and it's harder because well and it's what you know too right you spent your childhood there yeah it's what I know and it's just so rich it's just a rich rich place to be able to write about it just kind of leaps out at you and Rachel what about why did you choose Los Angeles over San Francisco well also first fiction yeah I read about a place I knew I grew up in sort of deserty suburbs around Los Angeles and so this book takes place in a deserty suburb near Los Angeles and I think that yeah I wanted to write about coming home to a place that was not a busy city and coming home to a place that you had to sort of invent your own you had to deal with the people in your house because there was not that much to do outside of that house and also at the same time I think I'm a very like visual writer and I like thinking in terms of images and so I had in my head from the very beginning like the Christmas that the book starts with and the Christmas that it ends with being these sunny Christmases where you could be stuck on a freeway looking at a man blasting Christmas music out of his car when it's super bright and sunny outside okay and as a writer I always like to ask writers what their process is what is your writing process like and do you have any writing rituals do you get up every morning and write Margaret no I mean because I have three kids so um yeah do you get any writing done at all what I do is I had a sitter when I wrote this book I only had two kids and so I had a sitter who would come in a few hours a day and then now they're in school till 12 so you know you just kind of I have a few hours a day that I'm able to work usually and so I try to write in that time period do I have rituals I always do I always go all the way through because I know some people do research first and then they write it all the way through and then I go back and then I like fill in the holes with research but I find it's easier for me to do that kind of stuff the like heavy revision and the research once I have the draft laid out because I have an incentive because I'm like oh this is almost done it's not really like oh this is almost done so I you know I just have a few more things that I need to do and so yeah so that's that's the thing that has been consistent I would say across because I wrote a book before this is what I'm saying always Rachel I don't have three kids it's very lazy in comparison but I do wake up every morning and write in the morning I think I like writing in that period of time when you're sort of not fully awake because I think that then I don't second guess myself as much and I don't have that like voice in my head telling me that everything is trash so it's good to sort of trick yourself into writing I think is my ritual just to like start writing when you're not fully awake yet and then just like go for as long as possible. No coffee? I do drink coffee yeah one cup of black coffee okay does anyone have any questions? Awkward to like then like once your family read it to like for them to see themselves I'm sure I mean with any book if you're going to be honest at all they're going to be positives and negatives that you write about what were those conversations like once your family started to maybe see themselves in it or would be like hey like what are you trying to say about me? Well I'm going to push back a little bit because these are fictional pieces and I think that you know you do steal a lot from life and like people that you know in life and I definitely stole a lot of like things people have said to me but I don't think that any of the family members in the book are family members that I have in real life so I wasn't really worried about that at all I was more worried about the fact that like I so I my family's Chinese they're immigrants from Malaysia my parents are very Christian they also like never read novels in their lives and so my book was coming out and there's some there's like a I say the word shit on the very first page like they don't like cursing so I was very nervous about showing that to them because they're they you know I've managed to avoid speaking with them about anything controversial in my life or just you know mostly getting like just living a mostly exemplary life as like you know as far as they're concerned and so I was a little bit nervous about that but it turned out fine I think they were just really proud you know and I think that I have been working for most of my life to like just take away all of their expectations like I didn't turn out to be a doctor or an engineer or whatever or lawyer nothing that made money and so I think that at every step of the way I've been like hey parents sorry I'm just gonna do my own thing and I think that they to their credit have been very supportive of me the whole time and when my book came out or actually before they read the advanced version and my mom told me that the first novel she had ever read and it would be her favorite novel and then I also thought what about my next novel does that mean you're not gonna read that but yeah she said she didn't like the curse words but it was all otherwise fine well I can speak to that because I did actually I wouldn't say the characters are well the characters are loosely based on family members in the sense that I get like a vision for a character and so when I'm beginning the writing process that's sort of who I'm basing it on visually and in terms of what I know about that person but it immediately almost immediately veers drastically away from that person so the final product nobody would recognize themselves I mean the facts are completely different but it does start out with that conception and I did I had a family member whom I spoke with a lot because he is in the demographic that one of my characters is in T.C. and so I would ask him questions about like you know language slang that he uses you know what is day to day life is like just questions to just get the context of his life but you know what I would say that that I was a little nervous about that but I think it helps me to portray the character more humanly because you know you are thinking what if this person is going to have an idea that to some extent this character is based on him like it's very different from the original conception but I did ask him questions about his life and use some of those examples in the book you know what I mean with his consent so it kind of makes you want to really do the character justice because you are like this could be my relative and I want the relative reading this book to know I just want to portray him as a human you know and it kind of enables you to really get out of the stereotype zone Hello Harry I am also a writer and artist I post poetry online the question is did you write the book on what medium did you use paper did you type it out well how did you on what medium did you write your book I typed it out on word computer computer yeah I think but when I was younger I used to write out everything and then retype and then type it but you know but no this time I typed it initially yeah I also used word because I can't read my own writing it's very messy but I actually started using Scrivener for this next thing that I'm working on because it's just a lot it would have been helpful for this one too but I just didn't know it existed and it kind of breaks things down into smaller pieces and lets you move things around I'm not sponsored but it's a great program I heard about Scrivener I'm going to try that too do you write every day or not can you tell me about your writing path I don't but but I found that in the beginning it helped to write every day but now that I know you know I have the habit of it already so I don't need to do it every day I wish I could but I don't need to but in the beginning I think it was helpful to do it every day just to build the habit you know I don't write on weekends but I write like at least for an hour every day I'm really busy just I set a timer and do at least an hour this is for Rachel when I first came across the title of your book I thought it was a book on alternative medicine or self-help but the library has 200 people waiting for the copy I waited and a few months later it was my turn I was happy that I waited I have a quick question the book is focused on father-daughter relationship but I can imagine that there must be a lot of undercurrents going on between Ruth and the mother as well so that probably could be easily a different book but have you thought about that? a sequel? exploring the other relationship you mean? daughter and mother in terms of their competition and maybe even anger, hostilities well I definitely wanted that to be a part of the book and I think that that was a relationship that I thought about a lot I think that I explored in this book as much as I could have I don't think I'm going to write any sequels but I appreciate your noticing it it was definitely a big component of the book too and those relationships oh no well again my family was like this is not us great job fiction Margaret you mentioned that this wasn't your first book you've written before I was just wondering how many books have you guys written that weren't published and how long this one took to write? the first one that I wrote took four years and it never got published and I just thought that was going to be my book and I kept working on it I had an agent but the agent couldn't sell it and then finally I joined this like year long narrative program where we had to start a new book to be eligible for the program so I wrote this book but it was like an afterthought while I'm still sending out this other book but it turns out this book it's funny this book took about eight months and I know right and the first one again four years and never got published and this one I think I saw the fruit of all that effort and it just happened very quickly this was definitely my first novel and my first novel attempt but it took me a long time I started it maybe 2009 or 2010 and so like the writing of it was five years and then publishing it was another two years so it took a long time and I wrote short stories before that and thought that I would have a short story collection and then just couldn't I just realized that it was having a short story collection would have been so hard because I was so obsessive and so like angry with each one of the stories and so I think at some point I was like I'll write a novel and then I'll just have one thing to hate instead of ten things to hate so it was a very practical motive for me but yeah no it took a long time things take a long time First of all congratulations this writing a novel is no small feat to both of you I'm curious to hear if there were sections of your book that you got feedback or when you read it felt like you had to completely rewrite it and or start over somewhere could you talk a little bit about the process of revising and restarting something and how you found your way out of it I can go first so the Jackie section which is a third of the book that was completely I mean it was a totally different storyline like very windy and didn't really have a strong resolution because it wasn't really a tracked storyline I don't think I thought about it enough before I started writing it and it didn't really feed the message of the book as much either so my editor told me she had her idea of how I could change it and I just felt like I tried it but I just felt like that wasn't working either and her way would have been a little bit quicker because it wasn't just to scrap the whole thing and start over but I tried her way and it didn't work out so I just scrapped it and I just started all over because I just felt like there was nothing I could do with that part without just a whole new really a whole new storyline so I came up with a whole new storyline about it like the whole war on drugs piece wasn't in the book at first it came about because I was trying to figure out the bridge between Jim Crow and mass incarceration how you could have such a well to do grandmother end up with a grandson in prison and I tried to think like what would have happened in that child's childhood that could have led to this outcome and so that's when the war on drugs thing kept coming up because I was seeing all these documentaries and reading a lot about it and so I just started all over with the whole new storyline and I had done that quite a bit with the first book that I told you took four years I had done that about 15 times in fact today even I was looking at something because I'm writing something else and I was looking at an old draft of the first book that I wrote and I was like oh okay so in this this is the draft where I had four different blocks but there are like 15 drafts I mean there are somewhere it's just one perspective somewhere it's four perspectives somewhere but anyway yeah so I mean yeah I've done a lot of revision and just scrapping and starting all over and it's very difficult I think because you don't really know if you're going to get rewarded for it you know you just could be wasting your time but I find that you really get it all later like you get the fruit of that later you know what I mean and you're not sure when but you do get it yeah I think my revision process was very I had the beginning and I had the end of the book when I started writing but everything in the middle changed and I would just when I sat down to revise sometimes or to write more I would wind up just deleting things and so I would sit down to write and then just have fewer words than when I started because that's kind of part of my process unfortunately and so even till the very last copy edited past I was deleting things from the first page and they were like prying it from my hands but I think that yeah for me it was it was good that the format was just like the form of the book was what it was because I could almost enter the story at random and then just like feel it out that was really useful I think to me in the revision I think like I wish that process that I had for this last book would translate to a more efficient process for the next book but I don't think that that's the way that it goes like I think that each one is just its own problem so for this book it was really useful to me to have it in these really fragmented pieces because I was working a full-time job I had to just work on this book when I had the time and getting to jump into it when I could and into these dated entries was really useful for me so for the next book I don't know maybe the revision process will be just like typing it out once and typing it out again I don't know like I think it's all very idiosyncratic and specific unfortunately I heard you both speaking to like this process of writing your books and I was curious if you could speak more to how you sustained yourself through that process like both financially you were mentioning like a job but also creatively and otherwise like what kept you going through that process well I think you know I I see a former co-worker here so I'm just pointing her I think I had something to prove because I left my job and it's like well this has to work out because you left your job you know I think that was a lot of it though I really think just I really felt like I you know it was a dream of mine I put so much into it I sacrificed a lot for it and I just I just felt like I felt like it had to work out but also every time I would be on the verge of considering doing something else I would get a nice little universal gift like a gift from the university like oh you got accepted to this random program and it didn't necessarily go anywhere but it would just be like a pick me up when I needed it you know and there were there were scattered things like that along the way that kept happening my husband was very supportive and he would always tell me that you know it was going to work out it was just a matter of time I just needed to keep going my friends were telling me that stuff too so I think that's important having having a group of people who really believe in your vision for yourself I can't stress that enough because if you don't have that your own vision is going to waver because you're pounded with rejections I mean I've gotten hundreds of rejections seriously I'm not exaggerating so you have to have people in your corner who are like I I support this vision for you and I also see it as strongly as you see it and it's like a shared thing that we all see and I think that's just I think that I can't say enough about how important that is yeah I close on that I also I mean I think that being a writer and writing a book was something that I wanted to do all my life as a kid just like reading books and wanting to be a writer of them but I think that I had always had this very practical side of me too again like my parents wanting me to make money me also wanting to just like support myself and not be a starving artist and so I've always worked as I've also been writing and I think that what sustained me was just like the pleasure of writing itself you know obviously it's not always super fun but I think that just like the privilege of getting to do it it really doesn't take a lot you can do it for free and you can do it just with you know an hour or even less than that sometimes it was just half hour snatches before work and so I think just like the pleasure of getting to do it and how much fun it is is what kept me going but yeah it sucks and rejection sucks a lot and it's constant like it never ends so getting rejected now even though we're up here I'm curious what piece of writing enabled you to find your literary agents and why you think it was that piece that did it if it was one well for me I actually the book was finished before I had an agent for my first book but she couldn't sell it so I had to end the relationship with her because it obviously wasn't going anywhere and so I went another year after I ended the relationship with her with no agent and that's when I started writing this book and so I I think I told you I did a year long narrative program the woman I did the year long narrative program with was married to a publisher and so she gave the publisher this book and the publisher liked the book a lot but needed an agent to buy it so he got me an agent which never happens that way right it's funny how I put in so much effort with the first book and it just was like it went anywhere and this one it just it's like people were coming to me for I didn't have to look for an agent the agent came for me it was the piece of writing was just this book I mean it was an earlier version of it and I had been looking for agents for a little while but the one that I'm with now signed on with this book and she's like my first reader for everything but I finished a story I just send it off to her and she's the best I was just wondering how your now that the books are done and all the editing is done and it's published and in print how your relationship with your own book has changed like it seemed like both of you were having some some insights tonight as a result of questions and comments and just sort of curious you know in general and anything in particular that you write your own book after you were done writing it I mean it just the process is so long and I think for me it was interesting to just get back into the headspace of like writing this book and like all the things that I was feeling when I started this book just tapping back into those feelings and remembering why I wrote the book because it does get it just removed I guess like it does feel like a lifetime ago almost that I started writing this but it's relevant to memory in my case so yeah I think it's it's definitely been exciting to hear from people who are reading it for the first time and encountering the material for the first time and then seeing it a new way and re yeah just reacquainting myself I guess yeah I would echo that it feels very removed like for instance when I started doing interviews I had to go back and re-read it because people would ask me questions and I wouldn't know I would have to think about it and I'm like oh yeah it was 1944 well sometimes I'd be like that's not in the book what are you talking about and I would go back and oh yeah you know more than I do actually yeah because they would have just read it and you haven't read it in a year so you just I just didn't a lot of the stuff I didn't remember so there's that but then what I love about it being removed is that it's almost like it's alive in a different way people are inserting their own meaning into it and they'll tell you oh I love that you did it this way because of that and that's not the reason I did it that way but okay that's great that you love it I think that's awesome and that's what it is any kind of art when you put it out into the world people will receive it and they'll put meaning on it and I think that's really cool I always say I wish I could read this book as a reader though that's what I really miss like I wish that I could I don't have the experience that other readers will have of it and I miss that because they talk to me about the impact it had and they talk to me about the characters they love and I'll never be able to go freshly into this book and feel that so that's the only thing that I miss because when I was first writing it there was more a little bit more of that there like you know you're getting live feedback that you're incorporating and you're just not as distant from it so you do feel more it just feels more fresh but now I yeah I'll never I'll never see it that way so that's kind of a bummer hi I wonder if either of you would ever take say a real family situation you know from your own families and and use that as a I don't know a prompt you know for for writing fiction and where is that so creatively where where is that dividing line between fact and fiction can they play off each other in an interesting way that ends up being a piece of fiction that works I was struggling with something like that yeah totally I mean I would love to do that I would but my family would never forgive me but I would I would love because my family is very rich they have you know with their material they have a lot going on so I could really get into that but you know I try to just if I do it I try to by the end of the process get really removed from it so that they wouldn't recognize themselves but you know people write memoirs and I have my editor writes memoirs and she says that she writes her family right before it gets published and she says you know these are the ways in which I mention you if you have any issue with that please let me know and I can put it in an addendum in the book and so that's how she handles it but I mean people have so many ways of handling it and I will say I do write personal I'm starting to write personal essays and so far I've just done it in a way that's really it's not too hard on any of the people mentioned but at a certain point if I continue to write personal essays they're not all going to be able to be like that so I'm cognizant of that and I'm curious myself to see how I'm going to handle it yeah I think for me I write fiction for a reason and it's definitely not memoir like I think that has never really interested me just like writing something true like that's why I'm doing this and not the other thing but I do think that fiction is a blend of all of these different things right there's a big imagination component there's also observation and then there's stuff that actually happened to you and so in this book I definitely stole a lot of stuff from like ex-boyfriends and so far they have not hunted me down for anything so I think you just be brave and just do it and the thing is like yeah fiction does take on a life of its own at least for me it has always done that where like Margaret has said you start with the seed of somebody or just like some impression or some encounter and then most people don't know that you're stealing from them because they don't even remember it's so true I have this question right here a lot of pressure what I wanted to ask about was research and Margaret you had mentioned that you kind of write through the story and then go back and fill in the holes and I'm just wondering if you could both, if you could talk a little more about that and Rachel you could talk a little about what role research played the novel's like what were the questions that you were asking that you were down the Wikipedia wormhole about there's always a question coming from someone who's just never even attempted to write something with the complexity of either of your novels thank you well for this book yes I did do the whole I did all the drafts first and then I did the research I'm pretty sure I did it that way yeah and then this book had to be heavily researched because part of it was in the 40s and then the 80s I knew fairly well I grew up in New Orleans in the 80s but the whole war on drugs thing had to be researched and then post Katrina just getting into the mindset of a 20-something year old man who's in and out of jail you know that was also heavily researched more anecdotally than the other two sections which were based on reading but but yeah this book actually I would say half of the time spent on it was research if not more but I'm writing something now that's not that way it's you know I'll do some research but it won't be that much and I actually think for me I'll say this book requiring so much research made it richer because it really opens the door when you start when you start reading about the history of something or when you just start listing that people tell their stories about stuff from the door to more story avenues you can go down and I actually think it's a disadvantage for the book I'm working on now that there isn't as much research involved because I just won't get as much like contribution of material if that makes sense yeah I did a lot of research for this book too just I think researching in my process is always like something that I do when I can't just write and so I think that it adds layers to whatever you're working on it adds complexity and yeah it's good to have context I think for what you're writing about and so I would sort of if I felt really stuck I would try to like I would either go like sit outside or like take a walk or I would go down some kind of terrible internet wormhole and like I spent a lot of time just like reading caregiver forums like on the internet or just yeah there are just lots of different things that could be I think in any piece of writing right that can be researched or that it doesn't hurt to know more about than whatever your own experience with it is and so I found it really helpful when I was stuck you know like I think sometimes you do feel like you just can't write like writing is the hardest thing in the world and so when that happened I would do research and feel at least a little bit productive on that note. Thank you very much both of you I want to thank you for your inspiring words and also hope that we've inspired you if you're writers or readers I think this is a wonderful panel and we hope that you'll join us for our upcoming events through the week for Litquake and also out there through the city it's a fantastic week ahead. Thank you for joining us at Mechanics Institute and good night. The authors are available to sign books now.