 Welcome again to the Last Confessions of Sylvia P. We will be getting started shortly as our guests continue to filter into the Zoom. All right, it's 6.02. So we should probably get started. And I wanna welcome everyone, I wanna welcome everyone to the Last Confessions of Sylvia P, which is a conversation between author Lee Kravitz and Aaron Byrne. My name is Taryn Edwards, and I am one of the librarians here at the Beautiful Mechanics Institute of San Francisco. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the mechanics, we are an independent membership organization founded in 1854. So one of the oldest cultural entities in the city of San Francisco, if not the whole of California. We are a wonderful library, the oldest in fact, designed to serve the general public in the state of California, if not the far west, not just those who wield a wrench for a living. We also are a cultural event center and a world-renowned chess club. That is the oldest in the United States. I encourage you to consider becoming a member with us. It's only $120 a year, and with that, you really do help support our contribution to the literary and cultural world of the San Francisco Bay Area. So tonight we have two wonderful speakers. We have Lee Kravitz, who spoke before the Mechanics Institute some years ago. He is the author of The Last Confessions of Sylvia P, which is what we will be discussing tonight. He also has two other books, Strange Contagion and Super Survivors, as well as a wealth of shorter pieces in many media outlets that I'm sure you have picked up before at your local library. Aaron Byrne is a good friend of his and is the author of Wings, Gifts of Art, Life and Travel, and other wonderful things, including the storykeeper film. Aaron will be moderating our discussion tonight with Lee. And she has assembled a salon of writers who will help her quiz Lee on the finer points of his novel. And we also will be taking questions from our Zoom audience later. So if you would like to ask something, please pose it in the chat space and we will get to it later. I wanna thank you for joining us tonight and also thank both Lee and Aaron for sharing their thoughts, their work, and their time with us tonight. Welcome, Lee and Aaron. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Tara Tarran and Mechanics Institute audience, home of the discerning reader. So Lee Kravitz, will ask Confessions of Sylvia P, is a masterful book that changed me and I can't wait to talk to you about it. We are here in Sausalito with a live studio audience who has been very poorly behaved. But I wanted, I'm just gonna run down a very quick introduction to who's here. And I'm just gonna say their most recent books. Jasmine Darsnick of the Bohemian, Naomi Goldner and Tom Fultz of Word Space Studios Literary Center and Terry at Press Literary Journal and Naomi has many published stories. Tanya Romanoff-Emakayev, San Francisco Pilgrimage, Matthew Felix Podcaster, of course on travels is his most recent book and he's hard to pack a guru. So thank you. Anyway, let's just dive in. Let's dive in, let's do it. Okay. I should tell you that the last event I did, I actually did by remote also and it was all zoomed in the COVID protocols. I actually did it feeling awful. Like in the middle of the interview, I was feeling really sort of bad. I got off the interview in the next day, so I saved everybody in the audience from getting COVID. Well, we tested before, so luckily you don't have it now. Okay, so I just want you to kind of start us off by giving us kind of a long elevator pitch for your book. Just tell us what it's about. You could read any time I ask a question, just feel free to jump in. To jump in, I want to thank you. The last confession is, Sylvia is really, it's not even a long pitch. It's the story of how Sylvia Plath comes to be inspired to write at the Bell Jar, her famous novel, The Bell Jar. And it's told from the perspective of three different women through three different eras. One is 1952, 1953 from the perspective of Dr. Ruth Barkhouse, who's Sylvia Plath's psychiatrist at the mental hospital that she finds herself in. And you might recognize her if you ever read The Bell Jar. She's a Dr. Nolan in The Bell Jar, which is right here. And then you cut to about 10 years later and it's told from the perspective of a character named Boston Rhodes, who's this sort of up and coming poet herself who meets Sylvia Plath at a very critical point, both of their lives, and then develops sort of an obsession and a rivalry with Sylvia that leads both of them towards sort of semi-tragic places, but also heights and greatness as well. And then you've got the third perspective, which is a curator, a modern day curator at an auction house who comes into the possession of a manuscript that may or may not be the handwritten first draft of The Bell Jar. And so each of their stories sort of plays in tandem with one another. And their common denominator is really Sylvia Plath and how that either the person herself or her legacy shapes their lives. Okay, thank you. Sprinkles throughout the book are reasons why Sylvia Plath is relevant today, which I thought was pretty brilliant like you're making the case for your own book. But I will say that she was really relevant to me because I have a family member who's bipolar and your book really gave me the gift of insight and compassion. So thank you for that. But anyway, why don't you tell us a couple of reasons why she's relevant today? Sure, so I can read something in a minute, but really the reason she's relevant, so of all the characters in the novel that if I'm anywhere in the novel, it's the curator because the curator is sort of asking me. Question why Sylvia Plath, someone who died 60 years ago, relevant today. And the answer to that in my mind is really how I sort of discovered Sylvia. I've read the bell jar and I've read a poetry, but I wasn't terribly familiar with her work. Before I became a novelist, I found myself really sort of trying to find a job, basically, because I didn't know what to do with my life. And so I wound up going to school to become a therapist and I wound up working at a mental hospital of all places and it happened to be the same hospital that Ken Keesey worked out when he was inspired to write One Flew of the Cuckoo's Nest. And so I walk into the mental hospital one day and there's a kiosk with all these books in it for all the patients who are sort of waiting throughout the day. And most of them are sort of like Stephen King novels and sort of cop novels, but ultimately the bell jar was there also. And so I picked it up and I read it and as I was reading the novel, I sort of realized like, I'm not just reading the veiled story of Sylvia Plath, but I'm also learning about a parallel story that's embedded within the bell jar, which is the story of confessional poetry. And confessional poetry is this really cool thing. It's the idea that before confessional poetry, you had poetry about the outside world, but confessional poetry is about poetry, about the internal world, our internal environment, our thoughts and feelings. And so confessional poetry burst onto the scene, not from somebody who was a revolutionary, but so it was in a mental hospital. And it wasn't just Sylvia Plath, it was Anne Sexton who was also in a mental hospital who started writing about thoughts and feelings and Robert Lowell who was also in a mental hospital writing about thoughts and feelings. And so it occurred to me that this movement, this literary movement that legitimately changed not just poetry and memoir and fiction and nonfiction in the 1950s started there, but also it affects us to today. Any memoir you pick up, any novel you pick up, when you see the nitty-gritty dark details that make life real, that is Sylvia Plath. She started the movement. So you can't have any of what we have today without Sylvia Plath. Oh, that's the, you know, you kind of segwayed into my next question. Oh yeah. So Boston Brooks, and I think I heard you say that she's sort of based on Anne Sexton. Okay, so she, one of your perspective is this letter from her to Robert Lowell. And I thought it was brilliant because the letter itself is a confessional. She's confessing to him. And I just like, I know that the Mechanics Institute readers are kind of savvy with this genre and Sylvia Plath, but what if you could talk a little bit more about like how, I mean, in a way, it provides healing, this kind of unburdening and this kind of honesty. So maybe you can talk a little bit about like the psychological benefits of professional writing. One of the things I absolutely loved about confessional poetry, so Ruth Barnas, she's in real life, she was a real person. She was really Sylvia Plath's psychiatrist. 1952, 1953. And what was amazing about Ruth Barnas house was that she was the very, she's one of the first female psychiatrists in the United States. Nobody was doing what she was doing. And what was cool about, I thought, well, she's so new and it's gonna be her against sort of the Freudian approach to therapy. Like wouldn't it be interesting if not only was she the first female psychiatrist, but she's also someone who's ushering in this whole new movement of experiential therapy. So if in the 1950s, if you were hospitalized, you would have been, you would have had talk therapy, you would have, and if that didn't work, you would have had electroconvulsive shock therapy or insulin shock therapy or some sort of combination of these things that worked, but weren't real pleasant. And then you have sort of the humanistic approach to therapy, which is, I don't see the illness, I see you. And so that's what confessional poetry was. It was, it gave people the ability to write and talk and tell their stories and explore their own narratives through their own devices. And that is therapeutic. There's a lot of evidence to show that just talking things out and being open and honest with people changes our physiology or thinking. And so Ruth Barnhouse was the person who ushered this in. So you can see how confessional poetry was not just therapeutic, but it was also a literary sort of bombshell as well. Like it was a great combination of things. And it's true that you can see, I mean, it's just woven through a lot pretty well writing today now. So we want to know more about Sylvia when I finished, when I finished your book, I just picked up the bell jar and I'm rereading it because the way that you do this, you kind of inject little bits of Sylvia here and there. And I always pictured you with a kind of a syringe. Like I give the reader a little more and it's all these different perspectives of Sylvia. And so I'm wondering like, how did you do this? So if someone had come back, it stopped me from back in time and said, you know, you're going to read a book about Sylvia Plath and it's going to be really challenging to do. I think I would never have written the novel because it's really, really hard to, you're writing about basically this literary icon and when you get permission to do that and you decide that you're going to do it, it's sort of like you've been given this golden goose, right? Like, and you've got to be really careful and do it right. So, and I also wanted to make sure there wasn't injecting or to use the sort of the metaphor too much of her if it wasn't valid or wasn't real. So, you know, how did I do it? I was like, well, I want it to be specific. Anytime she appears in the novel, anytime she speaks, it has to be really relevant. It has to be really important. And every word that she says has to not just drive the plot forward, but it also has to be true to who she was. And the fun part was Sylvia was different people at different eras. So when she appears in 1952, she is young, impulsive, dreamy, but she was also grounded. And so you have to find that voice and get that cadence. And then 10 years later, she's older, she's married and she's more sophisticated, more worldly, but she also has this sort of childlike innocence that appears in her work as well. So you have to get into the cadence of that. And to do it right, I knew that Les was more here. So it was like when she appears and she talks, it's like, okay, that's the moment that we need to pay attention to. So did you know, so you were basically, what you're basically saying is that you were both careful with when you, okay, but did you know it would make the reader just absolutely desperate to know her better? I did. It was an attempt to, you know, one of the things about Sylvia Platt and people talk about this a lot is that even though she was a confessional poet and we knew what she was thinking in all of this wonderful detail, every person who met her saw a different type of person. She was unknowable. And boy, like how am I supposed to define this person who's completely unknowable? And so from her psychiatrist point of view, she is a child. From her rival's point of view, she's vindictive and calculating. And from, you know, a modern day point of view, she's a brilliant genius with a legacy of mental illness, but also beauty in the world. And every character within each of these stories sees her as something completely different. So there's this huge variation on theme. One, you know, some people are jealous. Some people see glamour. Some people see someone who's completely naive and helpless. And I love that sort of, I love characters that you can sort of look at and go, wow, who is she really? And so if you walk away from this going, I know a little bit more about her, but not everything, that's sort of the reason. It's almost like every single thing you discover about her is surprising. It's surprising, but it's also a contradiction. You know, characters that are contradictory, who show up in one scene, like owning a room and in the next scene, they're crumpled on the floor crying, are the ones who are the most sort of intriguing to me. When I'm teaching writing, a lot of times I'll say, every character you write, every character needs to have a hook for a hand. You know, like, or the equivalent thereof. And so, you know, for some people that hook is scary. For other people, it's intriguing. And you can see the damage that this character is living with. Sylvia was like a perfect example. She really is. So in this book, you surprised the heck out of me four times. And I actually think that that is the most I've ever been surprised in a book. So I was to you. Thank you. And I know for the reader, like these surprises unfold, and it takes a lot of finesse. So I'm wondering how you did that? Like, did you already know this was going to happen? So plant stuff or did you did it occur to you that, oh my God, this was going to happen? And so you went back? Like, how did you do it? For the most part, the way the novel came out, I knew from day one. So when you read the novel, it's a prismatic approach to a novel. It's three stories that take place, basically split up. So in each, in different eras, and they kind of vastly between the three and about two thirds of the way through, you start to see how each of the stories is interconnected. And so putting it together was, I knew from the very beginning, that's how I was going to tell the novel. And it was like putting a clock together from the inside out. And the issue was, you know, I needed to plant things in certain stories, certain things in the early, you know, the early narrative and the middle narrative and the last narrative, so that they all sort of, you know, build on one another. The problem was, and I've said this in other interviews, that, you know, you don't write a novel and the first draft is what it looks like. It's not in the second or the third. For me, I have a tendency, at number 11 is sort of, it's like the other one. You're settling into my next. Oh, really good. So let's do that. But it's like, you know, so by the time you get to draft 11 or draft 10 or draft nine, every time you change a piece of it, you have to go back and change all of it because the novel's so interconnected. Everything that you sort of put out there has to lead to something, you know, it's like Chekhov's gun, except it's also like Chekhov's shoe and Chekhov's hat and Chekhov's wardrobe. You know, everything that's there shows up later and you have to do it in such a way that it's subtle, but it's also meaningful. So, you know, one of the things I love doing was, I input implanted codes within Sylvia's poetry. So you're introduced to a line from her poem in one story and then three sections later, you realize that you see her create the poem and then by the end, you realize what it means and how it's a piece of the puzzle moving forward. Yeah, that's amazing. So it was amazing. So during your editing process, as you said, you did 11 drafts. And I know we have a lot of writers in the audience and I'm finishing the first draft of my first novel. So I know from hanging out with you and hearing about your experience that like we as writers, we have to loosen our grip on the story. We have to let go of everything we had our character say. Oh, yes. We really might have to abandon our perfectly constructed ending. And it reminds me a little bit of when my kids went off to college to like just like, you worked so hard on this and then you have to let it go. So maybe you can help to help prepare me. Oh, I got it. I just want to look for this trauma. So it's a trauma that you have to lean into because I'll tell you, if you have the right team behind you, the right editors, the right readers, everybody in this room here, friends who worked on my book with me, it's a trauma that changes it for the better. As long as you have the right readers, I mean, anybody has an opinion. Any reader has an opinion. But if you have people that you trust, you realize that it's not just your story and that the thing is I knew that I was done with the novel because it didn't sound like me anymore. That's what I loved about it. It didn't sound like me. I can listen to myself on the radio. I don't read my reviews or read any articles I do because it sounds like me. But if I read the novel now, it doesn't sound like me. It sounds like its own thing. And I couldn't have done that without other people sort of saying, you know what? This doesn't work. This needs to go here. This needs to go here. When you write a novel, it's solitary, but you're not doing it in a vacuum. You can't. Do you feel like it's like you've got more out of the way? Oh. I didn't get out of the way. I actually, I was very much in it, but I also, you know, I started saying yes a little bit more than I said no. And that made a huge difference. My agent was a, and his team was a terrific resource because, you know, they would say things like, you know, I don't understand this or wouldn't it be interesting if or, and when they'd say that, my first initial reaction, my gut reaction, which would be the same as yours, I'm sure, is you're totally wrong. You don't understand my work at all. And you know, that line, you know, from Annie Hall where, you know, they bring in McClure from the audience. He's like, your analysis of my work is completely wrong. And you question everything. And then you take 24 or 48 hours and you're like, oh, crap, he's totally right. And I never would have thought to go in that direction. And I started saying yes more and it worked. And so the novel, it started in my head, but it's not mine. It's, you know, it's, it's everybody. I love that. I know. That makes it better. What if you can talk for a minute about the men in Sylvia's play, like Robert Lowell and Ted Hughes, her husband, couple of sentiment bitches. No. You know what? It's so funny. When you read anything about Sylvia Plath, and you hear any story about Sylvia Plath, all the men in her life are awful. They're all villains. And, you know, I think part of that, I set out in this to actually have nuance for everybody because I wanted Ted Hughes. I see Ted as obviously people see what he did and who he was in Sylvia's life. And it's very easy to blame him for what Sylvia did and what Sylvia became. The funny, not funny, the truth about bipolar disorder, which is what Sylvia Plath had, like that was called manic depression, is that it could have been anybody. It could have been anything that led her to do what she did. In fact, she didn't know Ted Hughes the first time that she tried to kill herself. When she was 19 years old. She had been in New York, was doing great, was having a manic break, which is basically the first half of the bell jar. And she was like, okay, I'm just gonna kill myself now. She didn't know Ted Hughes then. She didn't know, I mean, the men in her life weren't pushing her to do this. So the mental illness was a huge key factor. So if I was gonna portray Ted, which he appears in the novel, and somewhat true to form, we know sort of what he did and how he acted. And if you don't, I won't ruin it for you. But I wanted to portray him differently than anybody else usually has. I wanted him to be a fool. I wanted him to be somebody who was always one step behind everybody else. So he believes everything he says is wrong. Everything he says about Sylvia is backward. Everything that he, and even when Sylvia takes her life, which is not ruining the book, it's just sort of, everybody knows. He suspects that people called him a monster in real life. I mean, even at the funeral, someone slapped him and said, you monster. And it's in there. And he sort of, thank you. And he sort of says, did I do this? And of course the truth is, no, you didn't do this. Sylvia did this. And so he's always on his back heel. Robert Lowell, the crazy thing about Robert Lowell is that he was so manic and so drunk and such a womanizer all the time that when people sort of look at him as the head of the confessional poetry movement, he ran the workshop that all the poets ran at Boston University. Everybody who looked at him and saw him, saw him as a leader, as a father figure. He never saw himself like that. He was a manic depressive human being. He wrote, got out there, did what he did and left at the end of the day. So people assigned him sort of meaning that he never ever took on himself. And so throughout the novel, we sort of see him sort of come to realization that he actually does have an effect on people. And he starts to believe like, oh my God, I actually pushed people to do things that they shouldn't have done. And to sort of see his own humanity. And he sort of, at a moment of tremendous weakness, he finds his own sort of grounding. Right, right. You know, I urged the Mechanics Institute to take some time and find some images of these characters and these people. I found this image of Robert Lowell and I felt like, oh yeah. Like I just, like, and also there's some great photos of Sylvia and I found one in Paris. There's the one from Mademoiselle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's fun. It's a great, I love this book because if you read, check this out. If you read the bell jar, this book is full of codes. Yeah. It's full of hidden things. You can actually do the research. You can find, you know, her character is at a magazine that resembles Mademoiselle. And you can find the articles that she wrote and you can find pictures that she describes in this novel in real life. And so, you know, there's a triangulation I did in the research where, like, you know, there's characters who appear in the mental hospital with Sylvia in my novel who are real people and then who also, who appear as characters in the bell jar but also appear in poetry that Sylvia wrote using their real names. So you can figure out who these people are based on the characters, based on the poetry that she really wrote. So it was like discovering more and more and more. It really is, one of the titles of my novel is going to be the Plath Code at one point because there's so much mystery within her writing. And all you have to do is just scratch the surface and you realize you're reading more than what you're seeing. Wow, that is so much fun. Yeah. So much fun. In my experience, when you launch a book, when a book comes out into the world, you spend time, you know, talking to people and it's out there for a while and kind of perplexing you. So I'm just wondering what you've learned since March about Sylvia, about you, about the whole... God, you know, when you're writing a novel, you start out, especially in historical fiction, by the way, it's a beautiful question because it has taken this long. When you're writing a novel, historical fiction, you tend to, at least I do, start out from a place of, I'm basically writing a Wikipedia page of this person's life. And then you have to sort of, at some point, draft two, draft three, draft four, you step away from the Wikipedia page and you stop thinking of these people as real people and you have to draw them, not for who they really were, but their spirit has to, you know, that's, you're doing a caricature to try to embody who they were, but you can't be, you know, hewn or yoked to the reality of who they are. Exactly. So the book comes out. Hard for us to know and fix them. Oh my God, great, great, yeah. You grit your teeth. And so there was a part where, you know, Boston Rose was very much based on Anne Sexton at one point and then took a major left turn. And part of this was like, you know, I've got to actually let go of who these people were in real life and make them characters. As the book has entered the world and I've done, you know, these sorts of events everywhere and it's just super fun. I'm meeting people who are coming up to me saying, I grew up with Sylvia. I've had Ruth Barnhouse's family reach out to me. I've had Anne Sexton's family. I've had, you know, I went out to, I had to get the rights to use Sylvia's work and Sylvia Class of State, you know, Faber and Faber reached out to me. And so what you realize is that these are real people. So you come back to who they really were and you realize what a privilege it is to sort of allow them to play in their sandbox a little bit. So you know them better. Oh, what you do and you realize, I wrote Ruth Barnhouse's son wrote me and I was like, I'm great. Here we go. And he wrote and he said, I really appreciated the book. And, you know, another critic was actually a friend of Ruth Barnhouse's and wrote me from the, he's a Washington Post. They wrote me afterward. He said, I knew Ruth Barnhouse and you got her pretty, pretty correct, but not quite. And I was like, oh, thanks. And, but you realize like, yeah, it's, you are, you're working with them and you have to be respectful, but you also have to be honest with who they were. Robert Lowell, I love Robert Lowell. I love his work. He was not a pleasant person. You know, Sylvia Plath was a beautiful person. Did a lot of really wonderful things, but there are moments where she was awful and ugly and completely tortured. And if you can sort of capture that honestly, it doesn't have to be true. It just has to be honest. Yeah, yeah. Oh, thank you. Yeah. That's fabulous. So, what do you read us? I think we kind of forgot to hug you. I know, to read a little bit. Read, yeah. Okay. I would love to read, but also this will be short. This is from the part where Boston Rhodes. So, Boston Rhodes is a, so there's a little beat in here. I knew this. Is that better? That's perfect. It's a camera. There you go. Hi everybody. So, Boston Rhodes is a character who she's in her early 30s. She is by her own admission, a terrible at everything. And certainly terrible at getting that sort of 1950s mold of what a housewife is supposed to be. But she's a terrible mom. She's a terrible of life. She's a terrible cook. Like this is a biker admission, not me. But then she discovers poetry, the sonnet. And she's like, wow, I'm really good at this. I really like this. And so she decides to set out and get into Robert Lowell's famous poetry workshop at Boston University. And so, and she finagles her way in. And here she is. And so this is, and she's a rising star. She is rocking it until somebody else, a new student shows up, right? So, of course, everybody in your workshop knew who Sylvia Plath was when she walked in. The presence of the famed poet sent a charge through the room that inexorably changed the dynamic tenor and the chemistry of the practicum. By the way, Professor Lowell, do you know that your face is perpetually contemplative? Is possibly the most symmetrical face I've ever known. Not quite handsome, but attractive in its serene confidence. Yet on the day Sylvia arrived here, I saw the architecture of your bones change shape. What were you thinking in these moments? What intoxicating thought was potent enough to crack that stone facade? Or for that matter, shatter the order and the etiquette of the workshop that you so ingrained into us. When you had us make space for Sylvia at the table, Maxine in our workshop was more than happy to get up and bring a folding chair from another classroom. That's right. While I fought hard these many months to earn a place among you all, the table just gave Sylvia a chair. And instead of launching into your lecture while perpetually pacing the room, as was your usual way, you addressed the workshop from the head of the table directly beside our interloper. Another thing you never let the workshop participants do was read our own work aloud. You preferred to pick out one of the poems and recite it first to yourself and then for our benefit in a low and sometimes frightening rendition. It was the way that we did things. You reserved your judgment and allowed the workshop to settle on its own before offering forth your critique. But on that day, you fingered the pages of Sylvia's polio. You chose a poem from it, handed it to Sylvia and in your soft, dangerous voice you said, please read this for us. Sylvia stood the legs of her chair scraping against the discolored linoleum. She was 30 years old if I had to guess and outfitted stylishly in a red dress and red French shoes and red matte lips. She had Lauren Bacall as a loop expression of cool observation. Her face powdered to lighten the pigeon feather gray into her eyes. Tail of a tub, she said. She lowered the page to her side and began to recite by memory, verse after verse, her tone vital and vibrant, her gaze unblinking. By the fourth stanza, your workshop had inhaled like a big pink lung. I'm not gonna read the poem, but here we go. It was an unusual poem about the equally unusual subject, a bathtub. Yet in the workshop, yet the workshop clung onto each syllable of Sylvia's recitation. Succinct, the workshop said. Perfect, the workshop said. Clearly the work of a major voice, you said. Praising the poem from the start and why not? She was so confident, so self-possessed, so self-assured as though she were the only person in the room that afternoon. Oh, but darling, I was there too, was I not? Okay, thank you. Okay, before we get to our questions, which I think we're gonna alternate between here and there, I want you to, do you have anything to confess? Yeah, I knew you were gonna ask this question. I'm gonna give you your last confession about Sylvia. A mass confession of Sylvia P. I am totally infatuated with her. I love her, but I love her not for what she was. I love her for her weaknesses. I absolutely do. I think that she is, I love her. I love the Ronas and the beauty. I told you that when I didn't know what to do with my life, I became a therapist, I got my license anyway and I went to the training. When I read Sylvia now, I come at it from a place of unconditional positive regard. Like, I just love who, I love the broken pieces because it made her whole and human and she showed us how to be vulnerable and showed us that we could be that way. So that's my confession. Fabulous, thank you. Okay, so we'll start the questions. We'll go ahead and take one from one of our audience people and I'm going to scoot back to audience people. Oh, audience here. You guys can come up and ask the question. Yeah, Jasmine has a question. But you gotta be loud. Yeah, yeah, come on. I won't hear you. Yeah. I'm gonna sit. Okay. This is Jasmine. Okay, get yourself on camera, girl. Hi. Hello. Hi. Love your novel so much. I really love it. And I mean, it's not your first book, but it's your first novel, which is astonishing because it is so, it's just exquisite. So, but that's all the question. There's no question. Yeah, is there a question here? Come on Jasmine. What I wanna ask you is, I feel that every book teaches you how to write it as your writing it. I mean, there are only so many lessons you can extract from all of those primers on writing. Yeah. So, do you think that's true? And do you have some lessons that writing last concessions taught you that you're carrying into your next project? Yes. Oh my God. This is a great question and spoken like a true instructor. This is wonderful. So, yeah. So there's a couple. So the, so my technique is totally feel free to say whatever my technique is totally, totally. I think unique in the sense that if you were in my head while I'm working, it's a, it's a total disaster. It's, so one of the things I do, I can take out my phone here, but I actually for eight or nine months to get into the character, actually I think and speak and observe the world through that character's point of view because it helps me get the cadence and the sort of, you know, walking in the shoes, helps you figure out who they really are, what their desires are and what's getting in their way. So there was a time when I was driving, one time in somebody accident, I hit somebody in my phone and it projected sort of Boston Rhodes voice, but narrating as I'm driving. Like, oh, there was the, one time she had sort of a British voice, which is not her real voice, but she's like, oh, the sun is bright in it, but, you know, I'm so angry, you know, so you get into the, but it took me eight months to actually sort of understand who these characters were. And so I have a whole archives of getting into these characters and walking and talking through them. So that's how I sort of do it. The other thing that I do, and I've sort of said this a lot, but it's true. I also, from a writing perspective, I think about it in terms of it's work. Writing is, it used to be fun. And now it's more professional. It's during the first draft. It first draft and then 11 drafts in, but it's also, it is absolutely work. So when you're doing the work, I always write with my shoes on. That's what I like to say, I write with my shoes on because it's a job. That's what I could do, well. It is, that's totally it. You know, you're in your bathrobe, it's not work, right? So you show up. So what I do is, and I feel very fortunate that I'm able to do this, but I wake up in the morning. I can take my kids to school at like 8 30 in the morning, then I get back to sit down and I work as long as I can. Like with my shoes on, my shoes on. And then by the end of the day, even if I've written like crap, I feel like it's, you know, I'm working toward it. So part of that is sort of the esoteric answer. And part of it is just the craft answer. I'm very excited. I'm so excited. Thank you. Oh, thank you. Terri, take a wet. Terri, you're on mute. You're on mute, Terri. I got it. I got it. I'm going to find that long question. Yeah. So Diane has a question. Diane LeBeau. She posts that when she started incorporating women's poetry and feminist perspective into her teaching at the college level and she grew up during the Plath era, which she feels had a strong component of sexism and repression of women. Oh yes. She used to say to her female students that, or her students that to be a woman poet made it impossible for you, for one to get life insurance because so many committed suicide. Oh, wow. Wow. So she's, her question is, how did the feminist background, the feminist history, the, all of that, you know, 40, 50 years of feminism, how did that approach, how did that background affect your writing and your interpretation of life? Well, that's a very, very wonderful question. So yes, I mean, the reason that confessional poetry was so interesting in my mind was that the confessions were mostly coming from women and they were coming up and the criticism leveled against confessional poetry was, keep it to yourself. Like, we're not your therapists, you know? We don't need to know that you've had an abortion. We don't need to know that you think about sex. We don't need to know that you've been raped. We don't need to know that you are depressed or that you hate being a mother or that you love being a mother, but you have bad days. We don't need to know that you have aspirations and that you're not going to be a housewife and a mother, which is nothing wrong with that, but we don't want to know that you have aspirations and outside of that. And so the fact that confessional poetry took hold when it did and that it did it all was striking to me. You know, we're talking about the early 1950s, mid 1950s, that it took hold at all and that it was being respected and appreciated and continued just to grow and grow and grow. In my mind, that was sort of the foundation of the women's liberation movements and all of these sorts of things. And I loved being able to sort of dip into that and sort of naturally show this happening. Boston Roads is featured, you know, on the front page of a magazine and the article, the writer who's confronting, who's interviewing her isn't interviewing her. He's confronting her with questions about what gives you the rights. What makes you think that we care about this? Why should we care about your confessions? You know, you had the very, very famous sort of old guard, like Robert Frost, who would get up and openly lambast this sort of confessional poetry. There's a scene early in my novel where he lights himself on fire to draw attention to himself and away from the confessional poets standing up and reciting their poetry. While that didn't happen in real life, it was that level of sort of like animosity toward how dare you talk about these things. And ultimately it did change, not just poetry, but it changed memoir as we read it today. Memoir traditionally before it became about the average person who has an interesting story to tell or a keyhole through which we see the larger world. It was about celebrity. It was about famous people. And we just wanted to know more about Orson Welles and we wanted to know more about, you know, Marilyn Monroe and all these sorts of things. And there was a watered down sort of version of their life. But real memoir is about, you know, the stuff that we don't like to talk about, but it's so human and so common and so universal. And I think that's really where it took off for me. It was, it wasn't just about, you know, a women's liberation. It was about learning how connected we are as people, no matter where we come from, these universal truths. All right. So let me get something off of that one. Sorry, I just got one, sorry, I just got one. Just talk to Anna. Okay, bring it on. I don't want to take it off. Yeah, okay. I guess I have the inevitable question. Okay, the funny one. Which is, you're writing from a perspective of a woman. Damn. And surprisingly enough, you don't look like one. Yeah, thank you. I think, I think, I don't know if it was funny. So how did you feel about putting yourself into that? And what gave you the courage to do it? At first it was stupidity. At first it was stupidity. I didn't, I didn't think about the fact that I was a man writing as a woman. And in fact, some of the characters were originally going to be from the point of view of men. But the novel told me that it wasn't right. I wrote, you know, Boston Roads had to be a female because Boston Roads as a character was the exact opposite of Sylvia Platt. They looked and sounded the same, but she had to, from a character standpoint, be, you know, be opposite. But also so female. Ruth Barnhouse, her psychiatrist, was in real life a woman. And the third character was gonna be male at one point, but it just didn't resonate. It wasn't true. It came off as caricature and it didn't sound honest. So it needed to be a woman as well. So I knew at that point that I had my marching orders. Like I had to do this and do it well. And if I didn't do it well, I would be called out on it, rightfully so. And so part of this was really just understanding them not as women, but as people, as characters. Part of my approach was, you know, walking in their shoes as best I could, narrating, you know, eight months of narration into my phone and getting their, these characters down. I was learning who they were as people, not as gender. So there was that. There was also reading a lot of journals. If I was writing from Sylvia's class point of view or Ruth Barnhouse's point of view, from that, you know, from 1952, I read all of Ruth Barnhouse's letters to Sylvia from that era to get that voice down right. And then when she's talking to Sylvia 10 years later, I read all of the letters that Ruth Barnhouse sent to Sylvia 10 years later to get that tone correct. And same thing with Sylvia. So it was a lot of work, a lot of groundwork. To the extent that I succeed, yay. And if I fail, I take full responsibility for sucking. But it's, you know, the response has been really good. I've been pleasantly surprised. I was bracing for some real criticism and ready for it. And you know, the other thing that was sort of interesting from a marketing perspective, my first two books went under the name Lee Daniel Kravitz. In this case, they decided to go by Lee Kravitz. The reason they did that, you can get away with sounding more like a woman than a man. And until you turn to the back cover to see my picture, but for the longest time, that was the thing. And in fact, my editor before I ever talked to her thought I was a woman. And so she gets on the phone with me after she buys the manuscript and we're talking. And she goes, I was fully expecting a woman to pick up the phone. And I said, so I said, okay, thank you, thanks. You go girl. Thanks. So I just wanted to throw out to our audience that I would love to take more questions from the Zoom folks if they would post their questions in the chat space. That would be great. Meanwhile, does anyone in the writer's salon there have another question? Tom. Tom. Hey. Woo. Oh yeah. Scoot it in, Scoot it in, Scoot it in. Get on the camera. A lot of the book, a lot of the books, it's a thriller, which I wasn't expecting. Yeah. It's fantastic. But the Boston Roads character, I think like you guys talked about earlier, we were all seeking new, more knowledge now after what we learned from the book. And so for me, it's been the Anne Sexton. Yeah. I knew more about Sylvia than I did about her. I'm curious at what point did you decide it can't be Anne Sexton. Yep. And went with Boston Roads. Great question. That's a great question. Okay. So I knew that Boston Roads or that Anne Sexton in some way she performed had to be in the novel. She naturally fit as sort of the rival character. But the problem was that Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton were rivals, but like in a loving way. So Sylvia would write a poem about bees and beekeeping. And Anne Sexton would write poems about bees and beekeeping. They would talk about fathers. Sylvia would write about her father famously. Anne Sexton would write about her father. And so they were sort of talking to one another through poetry, but they were also sort of, there was that loving rivalry. In fact, when Sylvia died, Anne Sexton wrote a well-known poem, specifically to Sylvia Plath and about her. So they were friends, but also rivals, but in a loving way. I knew at some point that the rivalry needed to go beyond what was real. And I couldn't in good faith have Anne Sexton do the things that Sylvia, that Boston Roads could do. And so someone asked me one time, and they reminded me earlier, you know, what mental illness does Boston Roads have? And I replied quickly, she's just that shit crazy. And it's true, she's nuts because she does. She goes into obsession. She goes into narcissism. She goes into mania in a way that Anne Sexton clearly didn't. So the DNA, I knew that I departed from Anne. I kept Anne's DNA, but then from there, I looked at Sylvia. And I said, okay, well, Sylvia is good. She's kind. She's open-hearted. She's very vulnerable and she is a little bit naive. I need Boston Roads to be the exact opposite in every way. And that's what she is. She's not kind. She's not open-hearted. She's close-fisted. She's close-hearted. She's paranoid. She's vindictive. And all of these things had to come out. So I created Boston Roads. And I love her to death. I think she's fun, fun. Yeah. Nope? Yes, you're the audience. It looks like there's some stuff on the chats, but I don't know if I can read those or not. That's all me, though. Oh, it's all you. Come on down. I know this is so hard. I love the book, as you know. I was, as a writer, found it was really inspiring. And I was curious about how you wrote the sections. Did you write each section separately? Like, for a second, obviously, I'm sure you went back and forth. But I'm really curious because it's fascinating. OK, so thank you. That's a fun question. So the book, for those who haven't read it, I take sort of a prismatic approach. We're basically listening to some nuts. But basically, I take three story lines, and I split them up. And not only do I tell the story of three different stories that eventually come together, but I tell them backward. So it starts in modern day, goes to 1960s, and then 1950s, modern day. And the momentum of the story has to move forward, even though I'm moving backward narratively. So the math is a little crazy. And that's just sort of my head. It just sort of always naturally goes there. And I was sort of taking a cue from some books that have really just been very influential. David Mitchell is a big influence. He wrote The Cloud Atlas. And then Overstory sort of works in that sort of magical realm of structure. And that structure is actually, and these people have influenced so many people right now. Cloud Cuckoo Lane is a great example of that. What I did for the novel was I wrote three different stories. I knew that there would be ports, basically, that would connect each. And then I mixed it all up. And I started stitching it all together. And I have a picture somewhere that has, I took, I wrote out 312 scenes and color-coded them and had them here. And then I added, OK, this needs to happen here for this to work, for this to work. And so I kind of had like a current of the narrative structure, even though I was going backward. And so it was just this massive tree of plot points and structure. It was nuts. And of course, you send it to the people that you need to read it near my agent, my editor, and they tell you what doesn't work, which is fine. That's what they're supposed to do. But then you've got to go back and go, oh, my God, the structure has got to work. And so you've got to go back and forth. So at that point, you sort of lose all sense of time and place. And then you hope that at the end, it all holds together. And then once it does, you start building out from there. So that's how I did it. Thank you. Thank you. Matthew, you have a question? I have the easiest question thus far, which is, what's next for you? What's next? What's next? I'm working on another twisty literary mystery that twisty literary mystery. A lot of twists and turns. And it's one of those. I promised myself I would never do a book like this again, because it was so hard to keep in my head with three different storylines. And then, of course, the first thing I did was go back to a new novel that has six. And it doesn't just take place over 60 years. It takes place over 180 years. And so there's just, I love my game, but it's also just, I think that's just the way my head works. And I don't want to go too far into what it's the next one's about, but it's basically, it takes another sort of historical element and wrap story around it and moves mystery through it to sort of get to the greater truths about where we're at today. Yeah. OK. Great. Thank you. All right. So thank you so much, everybody who tuned in and are crazy. I want to say thank you. I want to say thank you to Erin. Thank you. You were wonderful. Thank you to McKinsey Institute. You were wonderful. Yeah, it was great. Thank you. I want to talk to you more about structure, because I know that our writers would love to take a deep dive with you into all of that. Anytime. Anytime. You can always reach out to me too via email. info at leakravets.com. Super easy. You can always reach out if you have questions about structure. And I talk to people all the time about it. Yeah, we're in touch. Thank you. No, they go into the weeds. Good. They would be completely fascinated by what you just said. Bring it. I love this stuff. It's wonderful. I always say it's a magical math that I always see it in terms of shape as opposed to anything else. And if it works, it works. Very good. Well, thank you. Great. Well, thank you both for coming out. And thank you to your core, your Greek chorus there of other writers. I love this format. It's like a hybrid kind of thing, like a less boring new. All my zooms are fascinating. But I just realized, what do you think? Anyway, I want to thank you all for coming out tonight and thank our audience for coming. And I look forward to seeing you all eye to eye in the flesh sometime soon, hopefully at Mechanics Institute. Sounds good. Thank you, guys. All right, have a nice evening. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.