July 29, 2024 • 37 mins
J. Courtney Sullivan is the author of “The Cliffs,” Reese’s Book Club pick for July. Known for her multilayered generational narratives, her work has received acclaim from icons like Gloria Steinem, Oprah Winfrey, and Reese Witherspoon. In today's episode, she discusses the central themes of her novel — the constraints and opportunities determined by a woman’s moment in history, and the poetry found when we delve deep into the history of a place. You can find “The Cliffs” on Apple Books or wherever you get your books.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hello Sunshine, Hey fam Today on the bright Side, New
York Times bestselling author Jay Courtney Sullivan is here with
us for this month's edition of shelf Life. Her novel
The Cliffs is Reese's book Club pick for July. We're
talking about the power of writing personal stories and the
curious ways she finds inspiration. It's Monday, July twenty ninth.
I'm Simone Boyce.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
I'm Danielle Robe and this is the bright Side from
Hello Sunshine, a daily show where we come together to
share women's stories, to laugh, learn and brighten your day. Simone,
I'm so happy to see your face. We got a
lot of FaceTime this past week in Nashville.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Yes, it was so fun to hang out with you
in a different setting and just decompress with some of
our favorite Hello Sunshine girlies. I also got to catch
up with some of my really good friends who lived there,
and I stayed an extra day at in airbnbus. This
historic home with beautiful floor and beautiful staircase. It's just
so charming there. The architecture in Nashville is amazing.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
I know you love great decor.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
It's true. I'm a sucker for it.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
I hope you had an amazing extra day there. It's
so fun in Nashville.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
I had the best time. Okay, Bessies, it's on my
mind Monday, you know what time it is. It is
an opportunity for us to start the week with some
fresh perspective.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Yes, Simon, what's on your mind?
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Girl?
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Okay?
Speaker 1 (01:25):
I want to talk about this article that I came
across in The Atlantic called Why You Should Trust your Gut.
And this article lays out away to help us recognize
that gut feeling in our own bodies that can help
steer us in the right direction.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
That's really interesting because we hear gut instinct that term
all of the time, and we're told to trust those instincts, right,
But I think it can feel very vague. So I'm
wondering if the article lays out tangible ways for us
to know how to listen to our gut.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
So the writer Arthur Brooks, he's one of our favorites.
He writes a lot about happiness and contentment and just
optimizing your life, and he says that you should pay
attention to three key feelings in any gut reaction, excitement, fear,
and deadness. So obviously you can guess what excitement is.
It's the one that he says that should never be absent.
(02:19):
So you should always feel prospective happiness or some sort
of joy for what you think is to come. And
then there's fear, which can manifest as both danger and dread.
And the writer says that danger in the right dosage
can be positive, but dread is never good, and dread
is like one degree away from deadness. So as you
(02:42):
can imagine that's really nice, comes to the bright side
on Monday, you gotta have the deadness to find the brightness. Okay,
I like it. Life's all about contrast, right. So deadness
is what Arthur Brooks describes as the feeling that's associated
with numbness, loneliness, hopelessness, and despair. And when it comes
to gut reactions, he says, that's a sensation that you
(03:04):
want to look out for and avoid. So all in all,
when making a decision based on your gut, we should
be using this metric system, this three prong test of
a lot of excitement, some fear of danger, and almost
no deadness. I'm going to go for no deadness. That's
my goal.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
Let's do no deadness.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
I actually think it's really interesting that he cites two
of these sort of negative emotions fear and deadness or dread,
because I have mixed feelings on gut instincts. So there's
a lot of evidence to support that gut instincts are
actually just an amalgamation of all of our past experiences.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
That's really interesting.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
So when you get a gut instinct or that intuition,
you have to make sure that you're not confusing it
with familiarity, because familiarity can be bad patterning and you're
not even recognizing it right. So I think a really
good example of this is hiring. Imagine that you are
hiring for an important position at your company and there's
(04:03):
a candidate that walks in for an interview and something
about them just feels off to you, even though they
have a great resume, great references. There's just something about
it that in your gut feels like it's not the
right fit. A lot of times that can just be
unconscious bias because you haven't had experiences with that type
(04:25):
of person. And I actually think the same goes for dating,
that sometimes people miss out on awesome people because they're
used to dating somebody that's familiar to them. I think
we just have to make sure that we're separating our
intuition from our familiarity because we could be missing out
on some great stuff.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
That's a really good point, and I really want to
learn more about the research behind that, because that sounds fascinating.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
Our guest today is someone.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Who seems to have a really good grasp on feelings, excitement, fear, joy,
and most importantly, inspiration.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Yes, yes, that's so true, Danielle. So every month we
interview the Reese's book Club author in our segment called
shelf Life, and this month's author, j Courtney Sullivan, writes
generational stories about women, and what's unique about her is
that she's often inspired by places and objects that she
comes across in her own life. But the key distinction
(05:21):
is these are places and objects with a soul. Like
in the past, an engagement ring inspired her book The Engagements,
and most recently, an abandoned house in Maine was the
source of inspiration for her latest book, The Cliffs. Wow,
you know this got me thinking about a major source
of inspiration for me. As a little girl, I became
(05:42):
known as the castle girl in kindergarten, Danielle.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
In kindergarten.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Yes, in kindergarten, because I would just draw castles, pictures
of castles all day long. I was like really fascinated
with royalty, with enchanted, living with motes. I don't know,
I was just obsessed. So this castle obsession of mine
evolved into a secret garden obsession. You know how there
are like horse girls. I was like, I became a
(06:07):
Secret garden girl. And I became obsessed with that movie,
The Secret Garden. I just loved the aesthetic of it
and the story and the emotion behind it, and really
this idea of like happening upon this magical, verdant place
where I could escape. And one day it happened to me.
(06:27):
I was playing in my backyard in Miami, and I
was kicking a ball around with some friends, and I
kicked the ball into this patch of palm trees, and
so I go through there looking for the ball, and
I had my own little Narnia moment because I climbed
through the palm trees to find that the ball is
now inside of this outdoor room that's encased in trees.
(06:52):
And there's this one really big tree that was like
perfect for climbing, and it had all these incredible thick
roots and life like vines hanging from it. And it
was one of the coolest discoveries of my entire life.
And this little secret garden became my escape in my
own backyard.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
You must have felt like you could manifest anything I did.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
That secret garden became such an escape for me. It
was a place where I could bring my friends, where
we could turn our imagination on and turn the world off.
And it has given me this sense of hope that
you can still find enchantment around the corner in your
everyday life. And I think j Courtney Sullivan, our guest today,
(07:36):
feels the same way.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Oh yeah, you can tell that just from reading her book.
I cannot wait to talk to her. So after the break,
Courtney's telling us what it's like to have her work
celebrated by incredible women like Gloria Steinham, Oprah Winfrey, and
of course Reese Witherspoon. We're also going to chat with
her about writing from personal experience and the power of imagination.
Speaker 4 (08:00):
That's up next. Stay with us, y'all.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
Courtney, welcome to the bright Side.
Speaker 5 (08:14):
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 6 (08:16):
So.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
You're really known for these multi layered generational stories about women,
and your first book commencement was recognized by Gloria Steinem,
Oprah Winfrey, and of course our own Reese Witherspoon. What
does it mean to have these women celebrate your work?
Speaker 5 (08:34):
Oh, it's completely incredible. When Gloria Steinem blurbed my first novel,
I was working as a research assistant at the New
York Times. Yeah, and I was used to answering the
phone for my boss, who was an abed columnist who
got calls from all kinds of incredible people all the time.
So the phone rang and she said, Hi, this is
(08:56):
Gloria Steinem, this is Courtney and I said yes, and
She's said, okay, do you have a pen? I'm going
to tell you the blurb. And I was like what?
And I literally almost fell off my chair. It was
such an extraordinary moment.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
I just don't know where you go from there.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
It's so unbelievable, Like, especially because your ethos is so
built around sharing women's stories, that sort of acknowledgment just
must have felt pretty incredible.
Speaker 5 (09:22):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Yes, you say that your primary obsession with fiction is
this idea that quote the moment a woman is born
will determine so much of what she's allowed to become.
That is such a powerful thought. Can you share what
you mean by that?
Speaker 5 (09:37):
Yeah. I think all of my books, although they're very
different in their subject matter, come back around to that
central idea, of course, their self determination. But also we
always exist within the confines of our cultural moment. So
when I'm writing about generations of women in one family.
My book Saints for All Occasions is about Irish Catholic
(10:00):
family very similar to my own in some ways, And
I think about the matriarch in that book, who, like
my own great grandmother, came over alone from Ireland at
the age of sixteen to Boston and is the reason
our family has been American ever since, you know, And
I think about what I was able to do when
(10:22):
I was sixteen, and the thought of just like crossing
an ocean and starting a whole new life is so
incredible to me. That was my great grandmother in her
particular moment, and because of what she did in her
particular moment, each subsequent generation has been able to get
as far as we've been able to get.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
Do you think about her and like call in her strength?
Speaker 4 (10:45):
Ever?
Speaker 5 (10:46):
Oh? Yeah, definitely. I mean this book the cliffs is
you know, very woo woo in a lot of ways,
and I'm pretty woo woo in a lot of ways,
And so I almost think of my grandmother, my great grandmother,
or my mother, myself, you know, my daughter now, like
versions of the same person, just with different external possibilities,
and of course that shifts and changes who you are
(11:08):
internally as well. And I with every book I write,
you know, I wrote this novel, The Engagements, and that's
the only book I've written that had a real person
at its center. Francis Garrity, who wrote the line A
diamond is Forever in the nineteen forties, and I still
think about her all the time. I even this is
(11:30):
really woo woo. Had when I was really in the
thick of writing that book, I had a dream where
like I was her in the dream from her point
of view, which I've never had that happen before. I
don't know if that makes sense now, but I get
so close with all the women in my books, she's
the only one who was actually a real person.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
And I actually think that one of the things that
feels really distinctive about you and your writing that I
haven't heard a lot of authors say is that you
include a piece of your personal story in your novels.
With the Cliffs, your main character, Jane and her family
struggle with alcoholism, and you've shared that you are eight
years sober, which is just such a huge accomplishment, and
(12:12):
so I'm curious as to why you wanted to include
that in this story.
Speaker 5 (12:16):
Yeah, you know, I think that when I'm writing a novel,
it's never because I feel like I have this clear
cut thing to tell the world or that I have
all the answers. It's more that whatever the burning question
in my mind is, I want to explore it and
find out how I really feel about it. And the
way to do that for me is writing fiction. That's
(12:38):
sort of how I process everything. And so for me
writing this book, you know, I started it four years
into being sober, and I've been working on it for
four years. In some ways very helpful because Jane is
such a hot mess of a drinker that it didn't
make me want to drink, you know, writing what she
does all the time is like, oh, thank God, I
don't drink anymore. But I think when you are a drinker,
(13:03):
when you have made mistakes like Jane does, like I
have the silver lining of that is like, you forgive
people more easily. You understand that everyone makes crazy mistakes
all the time, and people have forgiven you, so you
can extend that grace to them. Jane, I wanted her
(13:26):
to be in the process of figuring it out, so
she isn't, you know, wildly drunken. In every chapter, she
isn't reformed. She's kind of in the middle, and she's
still hoping she doesn't have a problem even though she
knows she does. And I think most alcoholics have that
(13:47):
experience where you know you'll go through the checklist. I
certainly did this where you're like, okay, ten signs that
you might be an alcoholic, and you go through nine
of them and can check them off easily, but the
tenth one is like do you pour cut into your
cheerios in the morning, And you're like, oh, I don't
do that. Okay, good, can continue freak. I also really
wanted to write about because I think it's very common
(14:08):
of a high functioning woman, a woman who's so good
at her job, a woman who people don't think of
as an alcoholic until you know she's very good at
kind of siloing these different parts of her life until she.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
Is You mentioned that every book starts with an open
ended question for you, what was the question that launched
the cliffs.
Speaker 5 (14:32):
That's a great question. So this time around, I write
a book about this woman who reluctantly returns to her
hometown and this big Victorian house. And in the process
of writing this book, I have left New York after
twenty two years there, moved home to my hometown, something
I truly never in a million years thought would happen.
(14:54):
And my husband and I and our kids now live
in this Victorian house with a plaque on the front
door that is exactly like the house in the book.
I've moved back to New England, and I think a
big part of the question I was sort of probing
was like, we are so interested in our own history
in New England. We're all about the first you know,
(15:17):
what was the first? And so in the book, there's
a plaque on the side of the house and it
says it's the Samuel Littleton House, right, and it has
the date that this house was built. Really, it's the
lives of women that have sort of permeated that house
and the land on which it sits, and the idea
that if you put your name on something, if you
(15:39):
put a plaque on something, that means you discovered it.
I wanted to kind of really explore that and turn
it on its head, and this sort of idea of
retelling history, looking at it through a different lens and
thinking about whose stories do get told and uplifted and preserved.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
Well.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
On that note, your editor posed a question in the
reader note at the beginning of the book, and it
really sparked curiosity and a new train of thought for me.
The question is what belongs to us after we die?
So how do you answer that question? Now?
Speaker 5 (16:13):
That's such an interesting one. Yeah. So, you know, in
this book, we have Jane, We have this present day storyline.
We have Jane dealing with her drinking and her marriage
imploding and her life imploding on several fronts. But we
also have the stories of all the women who lived
in this house on this land over four hundred years.
(16:38):
And even though for the most part they do not meet,
I really thought of them as being in conversation with
one another through time. Sometimes they are literally in conversation
with each other, but mostly it's what each one leaves
behind and the next one sort of picks up, if
that makes sense, And so I think I kind of
could go one of two ways. On the one hand,
(17:00):
we're looking at it through Jane's very realistic archivist eyes,
your story passes on to whoever it is who wants
to tell it or doesn't, depending And then there's this
other really sort of supernatural part of the book, which
is the belief in an afterlife, the belief that, you know,
mediums can connect us with lost loved ones. And I
think every novel comes from a whole bunch of places,
(17:23):
and often you're asked to kind of pinpoint like the start.
So I always say with this book, it was this
house that I discovered that was the basis for the
house in the book. But there were a lot of things,
and one of the things was that a couple of
my very close friends had lost their mothers. One of
the first things they did after they lost their mothers
was try to connect to them through mediums. And I
(17:43):
thought that was so moving and profound and interesting that
when we lose someone in our grief, sometimes what we
believe in, you know, we're willing to expand the boundaries
of that.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
So I know you're was inspirational for your creativity in
this book, I'm wondering what the most outrageous or sort
of outlandish object is that you've ever used for creativity
in your novels oooh, I love that question.
Speaker 5 (18:14):
So in that book, The Engagements, there are these sort
of secret memos between the ad agency that Francis worked for,
which was called NWAIR and De Beer's Diamonds. And these
secret memos went back and forth every year between the
two and they had been quoted in some nonfiction books,
(18:34):
but I was never able to locate where they were.
I was told that they were at the Smithsonian at
Boston University. I went on this wild goose chase, could
not find them, and I came to believe that no
one had ever really seen the memos. And on the
day this book was due to my publisher, it was done.
But I was going to Francis Garretty's house. I had
contacted the woman who bought the house from her. Francis
(18:56):
had been dead then for many years, but I just
wanted to see the rooms that she occupied, you know,
I just wanted that small touch. And when I was
leaving that woman's house, she said, by the way, when
I moved in here, there was a box of papers
in the basement and I never got rid of it,
would you like it? And it contained all the secret
company memos that I'd been looking for for four years.
(19:18):
So I feel like, you know, when you look at
these little intimate details, sometimes huge things come out of that.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
That gave me the chills. That is so very cool.
Speaker 5 (19:29):
I ended up getting an extension on the book so
I could work them into the book, and I feel
like it just enriched it so much. But I also
have like her childhood photographs. Like one of the things
I learned just through getting that box of papers was
that Francis dressed as a boy when she was a
little girl. So I thought was really fascinating. You know,
(19:50):
in the nineteen tens and nineteen twenties, she dressed as
a boy and her parents called her Frank. And so
I have some of these old black and white pictures
in my house in frames, and my kids are like,
who's this Is this a great great grandparent? You know,
I'm like, no, this is Francis. I've made my family
go to her grave. I mean, I'm pretty I'm in
deep with her. The other thing is that when I
(20:11):
was writing that book, The Engagements, I did a lot
of research at the Slessenger Library and Cambridge, which is
this wonderful archive of American women, and they have the
papers of Julia Child and Amelia Earhart and all these
fascinating historical figures we all know. And I thought a
lot about Francis when I was there, because she always
(20:33):
felt like she did not get the recognition she deserved
during her career, and so it was sort of a
dream of mine to eventually create an archive for Francis
at the Slessenger Library, which I have done in the
last couple of years. So now you can go there
and all the secret company memos. If anyone wants to
see them, they have to go to Francis Garrity's archive
(20:55):
at the Slessinger Librzing. And of course Jane in the
Cliffs is an archivist at this lessons Our Library. So
I knew when I went there now twelve years ago
that I really would love to include it in a book,
because I think they too, are sort of really hooked
into that idea that the moment a woman is born
will determine a lot of who she's allowed to become.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Courtney, your work reminds us of the paradoxical nature of life,
like how life can be sometimes ephemeral and also everlasting
at the same time as you explore the linkages and
connections between the women that are in your stories. So
(21:39):
what do you want readers to know about how to
make the most of their moment?
Speaker 5 (21:45):
I just think so much of it is about constantly
returning to like what a little speck we are, you know,
each of us is, and in the long story of
the planet and our species and all of that, you know,
we can get so hung up and so stressed out
by the smallest things, myself very much included. I'm not
as enlightened as I would like to be, but I mean,
(22:07):
it's so funny, one of my favorite things to do,
and it's kind of started. I started writing this book
almost exactly four years ago, and it was I don't
know if you remember what was going on in the
summer of twenty twenty, but we were all kind of
cooped up and at the time my kids were really little.
My daughter was like eighteen months old and my son
wasn't even three, and it was just completely bananas. You
(22:30):
couldn't take kids anywhere, and we were living near Albany,
New York. So the two places that we could go
and just kind of like let them run free that
were close to where we lived were the cemetery and
the Shaker Village, which then of course made its way
into this book too. And I love going to cemeteries
(22:51):
because they just put in perspective. I feel like you
walk your cemetery, at least I do. I always end
up feeling full of hope and full of kind of like, Okay,
my problems aren't that bad because I'm here, I still have,
you know, time to go. The other day, I was
having a terrible day and my husband's like, do you
need to go to a cemetery? And I was like,
you really get me.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Yes, we always say touch grass here on the bright side,
but maybe we should be saying touch graves.
Speaker 5 (23:19):
Maybe that's touch grass in a cemetery. Honestly, yeah, yeah,
very great?
Speaker 3 (23:23):
Is it that it's like you are?
Speaker 2 (23:25):
It reminds you of like what to do with that
dash between the dates?
Speaker 5 (23:29):
Yes, And it's crazy because you see you think, oh
my gosh, this person only had you know, whatever it
was twenty two years or sixty five years, no matter
what the number of years. It usually doesn't feel long enough.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
We have to take another short break, but we'll be
back in just a minute.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
Don't go anywhere. We're back with author j. Courtney Sullivan.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
Well, every month we invite our Reese's Book Club authors
to share a passage from their novels. So will you
share with us? Can you set up this scene for us?
Speaker 5 (24:08):
Would love to so bringing us back to the sort
of idea that this novel started with a house. Maybe
ten or twelve summers ago. Now, my husband and I
and our two friends were driving around in southern Maine
and we came upon this abandoned house. It was just
so mysterious. It was beautiful. It was perched on a
(24:29):
cliff on the ocean and fully furnished down to paintings
on the walls and rugs on the floors. And like
every kid who ever read Ralstein or Pardi Boys or
Nancy Drew or even just watch Scooby Doo is like,
what happened here? I need more information? And so we
kept going back every summer. We were fascinated, why is
(24:49):
this house abandoned? And you know who lived here? And
where did they go? And why did they leave? And
why did they leave in such a hurry. After a
few years, we arrived once and the house was gone,
and in its place was the foundation of this massive
mic mansion. And the house that was built in its place,
(25:10):
to my mind, was pretty soulless. So in the cliffs Jane,
who has always loved her whole life this old, abandoned house.
The summer that she moves home, she comes to find
that it's been renovated. It's been made into just kind
of an open concept, all white, boring thing by this woman, Genevieve.
(25:32):
In this passage, Jane is at Genevieve's house for the
first time, so it's the first time she's been at
the house in its new incarnation. On their way outside,
Jane excused herself to use the new bathroom on the
first floor, the powder room, Genevieve called it. She didn't
(25:53):
actually need the bathroom, she just wanted a moment to herself.
The space was small and windows with ridiculous wallpaper, black
with a pattern of hot pink flamingos that made her
dizzy to look at. Jane supposed it must be fashionable,
or else Genevieve wouldn't have chosen it. But to her
it fell off. Two pages from Main Coast magazine hung
(26:17):
on the wall, matted side by side in a gilded frame.
It took her a minute to comprehend why the cover
shot was familiar. She was looking at a picture of
the house. She was standing in that open kitchen, all
that white history meets modernity when an eighteen forty six
beach house gets a makeover. Jane read the opposite page,
(26:41):
which contained a lot of quotes from Genevieve and her
decorator about the many lengths to which they had gone
to honor the house's legacy. Perplexing, she thought, given that
they hadn't really There was a sidebar about Genevieve's purchase
of a Native American basket, presumed to have been made
in the middle of the nineteenth century right here in
(27:02):
southern Maine. Missus Richards bought the treasured Abenaki basket from
an au adapt whit based antique stealer. I saw it
and fell in love. It was so beautiful. I had
to have it, she recalled. Jane thought of the baskets
she had seen at the exhibit in Portland a few
days earlier, created by people who each came from a
(27:25):
long line of basket makers intent on preserving their traditions.
This house, as designed by Genevieve didn't feel like a
satisfying final destination for such a creation. She understood completely
now why Genevieve irked Allison so much. Even so, Jane
(27:45):
couldn't quite believe she was here in this place she
had once known so intimately, not trespassing on to some
stranger's land now, but invited in going up the stairs
without fear of falling through through them, flushing a toilet,
about to enjoy some nibbles on the patio, as Genevieve
(28:06):
had said, honestly, who said nibbles? Jane took a deep breath.
She opened the bathroom door and went toward the back
patio where Genevieve and Benjamin were waiting. Passing through the
big open space between the white kitchen and the white
family room, Jane saw the basket sitting on the coffee table.
(28:28):
She went right up to it. The braeding had a
pattern of dark blue birds around the rim. To Jane,
the basket radiated story. She wondered where it had been
these past two hundred years, where exactly it was made,
and by whom.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
I have such a clear visual When you say the
basket radiated story. I love that phrase.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
It feels like very metaphorical as well for the ethos
of your writing. Have some listener and reader questions for you,
and so let's hear what Shanna from Oklahoma had to say.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
Hi.
Speaker 7 (29:08):
I'm Shanna from Oklahoma. I'm a school librarian and I've
been trying to take my son to all fifty states
and last summer we actually went to Maine and your
book helped me to go back to those places. And
I love that in your book you have a quote
that says it never failed to astonish Jane that an event,
a local tragedy, could shape an entire generation and then
(29:29):
be forgotten. I feel like stories like yours help these
things to not be forgotten. And I was wondering if
there was an event in your life or in the
world that you've noticed that you feel like isn't discussed
enough and might be forgotten itself.
Speaker 5 (29:44):
Oh. I love that question, Shanna. Thank you so much.
And also I just want to say that school librarians
are my favorite people. Our school librarian is just a
total hero and he is improving the lives of kids
every day. In ways big and small. So thank you
for what you do and thank you for your question.
(30:06):
In my book Maine, my second novel, that's when I
kind of started thinking about this because in Boston in
the nineteen forties, there was a fire that really shaped
that whole generation of people in the city of Boston.
It was at the Coconut Grove nightclub, and my great
(30:28):
grandfather was a firefighter. He reported to the scene of
that fire believing that one of his daughters was inside,
which she was not. There were so many, almost five
hundred young people who died in that fire, and so
people in Boston talked about it, knew about it. It
was passed down in my family and many other families.
(30:50):
So I wanted to incorporate the Coconut Grove into the
story of the novel main but I almost felt like
is it over told? And so I sent this email
to maybe like thirty people, all of them in their
twenties and thirties, and all of them from the Boston area,
and said, do you know about the Coconut Grove fire?
(31:12):
And to my great surprise, I think only two people
said yes, I've heard of that. That was so astonishing
to me that something that had shaped a whole generation
of people in Boston, and this is just in one city,
let alone the whole country or the whole world. Two
generations later, it was sort of all but forgotten. And
so that was probably the first time that I decided
(31:34):
I want to uplift the stories of real people who
have been forgotten. And so in that story, in that novel,
all the characters who are in the coconut grove, who
die in the coconut grove or survive were all real
people other than the main characters of the book.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
That was one of my favorite parts of being a reporter,
was just telling real people's story.
Speaker 5 (31:58):
I goth me too.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
Yeah, it really is. It really is. Everyone has such
a rich story they just have to be uncovered. But
you did bring up main character, and our next listener, Ashley,
has a question about that and the state of Maine itself.
Speaker 6 (32:16):
Hi, Courtney, can you talk about the state of Maine
and how you have managed to make the state really
a main character in your books. How has your perception
of the state and your relationship with the state evolved
as you've written more books using the state as a
backdrop and a main character.
Speaker 3 (32:37):
That's a good question, and it's so good.
Speaker 5 (32:40):
Yeah. So I grew up in Massachusett. It's not far
from Maine at all, about a ninety minute drive to
southern Maine. And you know, every summer of my life,
I've gone to Maine for some portion of time, whether
it's with my parents and my sister when I was
a little girl, now with my own children and my husband,
(33:02):
between those two, with my best friend, and still with
my best friend. So I feel like when I go
to Maine, you know, I see all these different versions
of myself there. When I am in a gun Quit,
there's like a little patch of beach that every time
I walk by it, I remember being twelve years old
lying there with my grandmother on that beach that we
(33:23):
both happened to finish the novels we were reading at
the same time, and so we switched. And my grandmother
has been gone for so many years, but whenever I'm there,
I can just like see her there. I'm sitting there
writing a story. And so I think when we have
these places where we go, particularly on vacation, it's easier
(33:45):
to access those memories because it's such a small portion
of our overall lives and generally a more contemplative, laid back,
you know, version of ourselves. But with this book, I
really wanted to probe more deeply into the history of Maine. Now,
(34:05):
when you cross into Maine from New Hampshire, there's a
big sign that says welcome to Maine, vacation Land. But
of course that is true for those of us who
are tourists in Maine, but there's a much broader, larger
story to be told there. The Abbey Museum in bar Harbor,
which is a museum of Wabanaki history, the indigenous people
(34:26):
of Maine. They have on the homepage of their website,
not just vacation Land homeland. And I think a big
part of this book is not just about history and
what is forgotten, what isn't told, but also what are
we willing to grapple with and what are we willing
to receive? Because history is only as good as those
(34:47):
of us who are currently living and are willing to
learn about it and experience it and you know, evolve
from it. So I think that's kind of where I
am with Maine right now, and writing this book allowed
me to learn so much more about Maine and go
to so many more places than I'd ever been. And
(35:09):
I'm actually going to Maine for nine days of book
tour tomorrow, and I feel like, wow, I plan that beautifully.
I get to go to Maine for nine days for
work in July. What could be better? I mean, look
at this.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
You went there as a kid growing up with your grandma,
and now you get to do it and get paid
for it and do what you love at the same time.
So cool.
Speaker 3 (35:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
Well, thank you so much for sharing women's stories and
for sharing your story here with us.
Speaker 3 (35:38):
We appreciate your time.
Speaker 5 (35:40):
Thank you so much, with such a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
Thank you so much, Courtney, Thank you.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
J Courtney Sullivan is a New York Times bestselling author
and the July pick for Reese's Book Club. Her latest novel,
The Cliffs, is available wherever you get books.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
Listen along to The Cliffs on Apple Books, Reese's Book
Club's official audiobook home. Thank you to our bright Side
besties Shanna and Ashley for joining our book club today.
We'll be announcing the August Pick for Reese's Book Club
next week, so stay tuned for your next go to read, y'all,
and as always, you can send your author questions to
Hello at the Brightside podcast dot com. Well that's it
(36:23):
for today's show. Tomorrow, we've got award winning economist Emily
Oster joining us. She is talking all about the challenges
of pregnancy and parenting from a data driven perspective. Plus
she's answering your questions. So don't miss our conversation with
this New York Times bestselling author. Thanks to our partners
at Airbnb.
Speaker 2 (36:42):
Listen and follow the bright Side on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
I'm Simone Boye. You can find me at Simone Voice
on Instagram and TikTok.
Speaker 3 (36:53):
Danielle Robe on Instagram and TikTok. That's ro Ba.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
Y see you tomorrow, folks. Keep looking on the bright side.
Hello Sunshine, Hey fam Today on the bright Side, New
York Times bestselling author Jay Courtney Sullivan is here with
us for this month's edition of shelf Life. Her novel
The Cliffs is Reese's book Club pick for July. We're
talking about the power of writing personal stories and the
curious ways she finds inspiration. It's Monday, July twenty ninth.
I'm Simone Boyce.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
I'm Danielle Robe and this is the bright Side from
Hello Sunshine, a daily show where we come together to
share women's stories, to laugh, learn and brighten your day. Simone,
I'm so happy to see your face. We got a
lot of FaceTime this past week in Nashville.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Yes, it was so fun to hang out with you
in a different setting and just decompress with some of
our favorite Hello Sunshine girlies. I also got to catch
up with some of my really good friends who lived there,
and I stayed an extra day at in airbnbus. This
historic home with beautiful floor and beautiful staircase. It's just
so charming there. The architecture in Nashville is amazing.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
I know you love great decor.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
It's true. I'm a sucker for it.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
I hope you had an amazing extra day there. It's
so fun in Nashville.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
I had the best time. Okay, Bessies, it's on my
mind Monday, you know what time it is. It is
an opportunity for us to start the week with some
fresh perspective.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Yes, Simon, what's on your mind?
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Girl?
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Okay?
Speaker 1 (01:25):
I want to talk about this article that I came
across in The Atlantic called Why You Should Trust your Gut.
And this article lays out away to help us recognize
that gut feeling in our own bodies that can help
steer us in the right direction.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
That's really interesting because we hear gut instinct that term
all of the time, and we're told to trust those instincts, right,
But I think it can feel very vague. So I'm
wondering if the article lays out tangible ways for us
to know how to listen to our gut.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
So the writer Arthur Brooks, he's one of our favorites.
He writes a lot about happiness and contentment and just
optimizing your life, and he says that you should pay
attention to three key feelings in any gut reaction, excitement, fear,
and deadness. So obviously you can guess what excitement is.
It's the one that he says that should never be absent.
(02:19):
So you should always feel prospective happiness or some sort
of joy for what you think is to come. And
then there's fear, which can manifest as both danger and dread.
And the writer says that danger in the right dosage
can be positive, but dread is never good, and dread
is like one degree away from deadness. So as you
(02:42):
can imagine that's really nice, comes to the bright side
on Monday, you gotta have the deadness to find the brightness. Okay,
I like it. Life's all about contrast, right. So deadness
is what Arthur Brooks describes as the feeling that's associated
with numbness, loneliness, hopelessness, and despair. And when it comes
to gut reactions, he says, that's a sensation that you
(03:04):
want to look out for and avoid. So all in all,
when making a decision based on your gut, we should
be using this metric system, this three prong test of
a lot of excitement, some fear of danger, and almost
no deadness. I'm going to go for no deadness. That's
my goal.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
Let's do no deadness.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
I actually think it's really interesting that he cites two
of these sort of negative emotions fear and deadness or dread,
because I have mixed feelings on gut instincts. So there's
a lot of evidence to support that gut instincts are
actually just an amalgamation of all of our past experiences.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
That's really interesting.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
So when you get a gut instinct or that intuition,
you have to make sure that you're not confusing it
with familiarity, because familiarity can be bad patterning and you're
not even recognizing it right. So I think a really
good example of this is hiring. Imagine that you are
hiring for an important position at your company and there's
(04:03):
a candidate that walks in for an interview and something
about them just feels off to you, even though they
have a great resume, great references. There's just something about
it that in your gut feels like it's not the
right fit. A lot of times that can just be
unconscious bias because you haven't had experiences with that type
(04:25):
of person. And I actually think the same goes for dating,
that sometimes people miss out on awesome people because they're
used to dating somebody that's familiar to them. I think
we just have to make sure that we're separating our
intuition from our familiarity because we could be missing out
on some great stuff.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
That's a really good point, and I really want to
learn more about the research behind that, because that sounds fascinating.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
Our guest today is someone.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Who seems to have a really good grasp on feelings, excitement, fear, joy,
and most importantly, inspiration.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Yes, yes, that's so true, Danielle. So every month we
interview the Reese's book Club author in our segment called
shelf Life, and this month's author, j Courtney Sullivan, writes
generational stories about women, and what's unique about her is
that she's often inspired by places and objects that she
comes across in her own life. But the key distinction
(05:21):
is these are places and objects with a soul. Like
in the past, an engagement ring inspired her book The Engagements,
and most recently, an abandoned house in Maine was the
source of inspiration for her latest book, The Cliffs. Wow,
you know this got me thinking about a major source
of inspiration for me. As a little girl, I became
(05:42):
known as the castle girl in kindergarten, Danielle.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
In kindergarten.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Yes, in kindergarten, because I would just draw castles, pictures
of castles all day long. I was like really fascinated
with royalty, with enchanted, living with motes. I don't know,
I was just obsessed. So this castle obsession of mine
evolved into a secret garden obsession. You know how there
are like horse girls. I was like, I became a
(06:07):
Secret garden girl. And I became obsessed with that movie,
The Secret Garden. I just loved the aesthetic of it
and the story and the emotion behind it, and really
this idea of like happening upon this magical, verdant place
where I could escape. And one day it happened to me.
(06:27):
I was playing in my backyard in Miami, and I
was kicking a ball around with some friends, and I
kicked the ball into this patch of palm trees, and
so I go through there looking for the ball, and
I had my own little Narnia moment because I climbed
through the palm trees to find that the ball is
now inside of this outdoor room that's encased in trees.
(06:52):
And there's this one really big tree that was like
perfect for climbing, and it had all these incredible thick
roots and life like vines hanging from it. And it
was one of the coolest discoveries of my entire life.
And this little secret garden became my escape in my
own backyard.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
You must have felt like you could manifest anything I did.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
That secret garden became such an escape for me. It
was a place where I could bring my friends, where
we could turn our imagination on and turn the world off.
And it has given me this sense of hope that
you can still find enchantment around the corner in your
everyday life. And I think j Courtney Sullivan, our guest today,
(07:36):
feels the same way.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Oh yeah, you can tell that just from reading her book.
I cannot wait to talk to her. So after the break,
Courtney's telling us what it's like to have her work
celebrated by incredible women like Gloria Steinham, Oprah Winfrey, and
of course Reese Witherspoon. We're also going to chat with
her about writing from personal experience and the power of imagination.
Speaker 4 (08:00):
That's up next. Stay with us, y'all.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
Courtney, welcome to the bright Side.
Speaker 5 (08:14):
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 6 (08:16):
So.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
You're really known for these multi layered generational stories about women,
and your first book commencement was recognized by Gloria Steinem,
Oprah Winfrey, and of course our own Reese Witherspoon. What
does it mean to have these women celebrate your work?
Speaker 5 (08:34):
Oh, it's completely incredible. When Gloria Steinem blurbed my first novel,
I was working as a research assistant at the New
York Times. Yeah, and I was used to answering the
phone for my boss, who was an abed columnist who
got calls from all kinds of incredible people all the time.
So the phone rang and she said, Hi, this is
(08:56):
Gloria Steinem, this is Courtney and I said yes, and
She's said, okay, do you have a pen? I'm going
to tell you the blurb. And I was like what?
And I literally almost fell off my chair. It was
such an extraordinary moment.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
I just don't know where you go from there.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
It's so unbelievable, Like, especially because your ethos is so
built around sharing women's stories, that sort of acknowledgment just
must have felt pretty incredible.
Speaker 5 (09:22):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Yes, you say that your primary obsession with fiction is
this idea that quote the moment a woman is born
will determine so much of what she's allowed to become.
That is such a powerful thought. Can you share what
you mean by that?
Speaker 5 (09:37):
Yeah. I think all of my books, although they're very
different in their subject matter, come back around to that
central idea, of course, their self determination. But also we
always exist within the confines of our cultural moment. So
when I'm writing about generations of women in one family.
My book Saints for All Occasions is about Irish Catholic
(10:00):
family very similar to my own in some ways, And
I think about the matriarch in that book, who, like
my own great grandmother, came over alone from Ireland at
the age of sixteen to Boston and is the reason
our family has been American ever since, you know, And
I think about what I was able to do when
(10:22):
I was sixteen, and the thought of just like crossing
an ocean and starting a whole new life is so
incredible to me. That was my great grandmother in her
particular moment, and because of what she did in her
particular moment, each subsequent generation has been able to get
as far as we've been able to get.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
Do you think about her and like call in her strength?
Speaker 4 (10:45):
Ever?
Speaker 5 (10:46):
Oh? Yeah, definitely. I mean this book the cliffs is
you know, very woo woo in a lot of ways,
and I'm pretty woo woo in a lot of ways,
And so I almost think of my grandmother, my great grandmother,
or my mother, myself, you know, my daughter now, like
versions of the same person, just with different external possibilities,
and of course that shifts and changes who you are
(11:08):
internally as well. And I with every book I write,
you know, I wrote this novel, The Engagements, and that's
the only book I've written that had a real person
at its center. Francis Garrity, who wrote the line A
diamond is Forever in the nineteen forties, and I still
think about her all the time. I even this is
(11:30):
really woo woo. Had when I was really in the
thick of writing that book, I had a dream where
like I was her in the dream from her point
of view, which I've never had that happen before. I
don't know if that makes sense now, but I get
so close with all the women in my books, she's
the only one who was actually a real person.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
And I actually think that one of the things that
feels really distinctive about you and your writing that I
haven't heard a lot of authors say is that you
include a piece of your personal story in your novels.
With the Cliffs, your main character, Jane and her family
struggle with alcoholism, and you've shared that you are eight
years sober, which is just such a huge accomplishment, and
(12:12):
so I'm curious as to why you wanted to include
that in this story.
Speaker 5 (12:16):
Yeah, you know, I think that when I'm writing a novel,
it's never because I feel like I have this clear
cut thing to tell the world or that I have
all the answers. It's more that whatever the burning question
in my mind is, I want to explore it and
find out how I really feel about it. And the
way to do that for me is writing fiction. That's
(12:38):
sort of how I process everything. And so for me
writing this book, you know, I started it four years
into being sober, and I've been working on it for
four years. In some ways very helpful because Jane is
such a hot mess of a drinker that it didn't
make me want to drink, you know, writing what she
does all the time is like, oh, thank God, I
don't drink anymore. But I think when you are a drinker,
(13:03):
when you have made mistakes like Jane does, like I
have the silver lining of that is like, you forgive
people more easily. You understand that everyone makes crazy mistakes
all the time, and people have forgiven you, so you
can extend that grace to them. Jane, I wanted her
(13:26):
to be in the process of figuring it out, so
she isn't, you know, wildly drunken. In every chapter, she
isn't reformed. She's kind of in the middle, and she's
still hoping she doesn't have a problem even though she
knows she does. And I think most alcoholics have that
(13:47):
experience where you know you'll go through the checklist. I
certainly did this where you're like, okay, ten signs that
you might be an alcoholic, and you go through nine
of them and can check them off easily, but the
tenth one is like do you pour cut into your
cheerios in the morning, And you're like, oh, I don't
do that. Okay, good, can continue freak. I also really
wanted to write about because I think it's very common
(14:08):
of a high functioning woman, a woman who's so good
at her job, a woman who people don't think of
as an alcoholic until you know she's very good at
kind of siloing these different parts of her life until she.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
Is You mentioned that every book starts with an open
ended question for you, what was the question that launched
the cliffs.
Speaker 5 (14:32):
That's a great question. So this time around, I write
a book about this woman who reluctantly returns to her
hometown and this big Victorian house. And in the process
of writing this book, I have left New York after
twenty two years there, moved home to my hometown, something
I truly never in a million years thought would happen.
(14:54):
And my husband and I and our kids now live
in this Victorian house with a plaque on the front
door that is exactly like the house in the book.
I've moved back to New England, and I think a
big part of the question I was sort of probing
was like, we are so interested in our own history
in New England. We're all about the first you know,
(15:17):
what was the first? And so in the book, there's
a plaque on the side of the house and it
says it's the Samuel Littleton House, right, and it has
the date that this house was built. Really, it's the
lives of women that have sort of permeated that house
and the land on which it sits, and the idea
that if you put your name on something, if you
(15:39):
put a plaque on something, that means you discovered it.
I wanted to kind of really explore that and turn
it on its head, and this sort of idea of
retelling history, looking at it through a different lens and
thinking about whose stories do get told and uplifted and preserved.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
Well.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
On that note, your editor posed a question in the
reader note at the beginning of the book, and it
really sparked curiosity and a new train of thought for me.
The question is what belongs to us after we die?
So how do you answer that question? Now?
Speaker 5 (16:13):
That's such an interesting one. Yeah. So, you know, in
this book, we have Jane, We have this present day storyline.
We have Jane dealing with her drinking and her marriage
imploding and her life imploding on several fronts. But we
also have the stories of all the women who lived
in this house on this land over four hundred years.
(16:38):
And even though for the most part they do not meet,
I really thought of them as being in conversation with
one another through time. Sometimes they are literally in conversation
with each other, but mostly it's what each one leaves
behind and the next one sort of picks up, if
that makes sense, And so I think I kind of
could go one of two ways. On the one hand,
(17:00):
we're looking at it through Jane's very realistic archivist eyes,
your story passes on to whoever it is who wants
to tell it or doesn't, depending And then there's this
other really sort of supernatural part of the book, which
is the belief in an afterlife, the belief that, you know,
mediums can connect us with lost loved ones. And I
think every novel comes from a whole bunch of places,
(17:23):
and often you're asked to kind of pinpoint like the start.
So I always say with this book, it was this
house that I discovered that was the basis for the
house in the book. But there were a lot of things,
and one of the things was that a couple of
my very close friends had lost their mothers. One of
the first things they did after they lost their mothers
was try to connect to them through mediums. And I
(17:43):
thought that was so moving and profound and interesting that
when we lose someone in our grief, sometimes what we
believe in, you know, we're willing to expand the boundaries
of that.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
So I know you're was inspirational for your creativity in
this book, I'm wondering what the most outrageous or sort
of outlandish object is that you've ever used for creativity
in your novels oooh, I love that question.
Speaker 5 (18:14):
So in that book, The Engagements, there are these sort
of secret memos between the ad agency that Francis worked for,
which was called NWAIR and De Beer's Diamonds. And these
secret memos went back and forth every year between the
two and they had been quoted in some nonfiction books,
(18:34):
but I was never able to locate where they were.
I was told that they were at the Smithsonian at
Boston University. I went on this wild goose chase, could
not find them, and I came to believe that no
one had ever really seen the memos. And on the
day this book was due to my publisher, it was done.
But I was going to Francis Garretty's house. I had
contacted the woman who bought the house from her. Francis
(18:56):
had been dead then for many years, but I just
wanted to see the rooms that she occupied, you know,
I just wanted that small touch. And when I was
leaving that woman's house, she said, by the way, when
I moved in here, there was a box of papers
in the basement and I never got rid of it,
would you like it? And it contained all the secret
company memos that I'd been looking for for four years.
(19:18):
So I feel like, you know, when you look at
these little intimate details, sometimes huge things come out of that.
Speaker 3 (19:26):
That gave me the chills. That is so very cool.
Speaker 5 (19:29):
I ended up getting an extension on the book so
I could work them into the book, and I feel
like it just enriched it so much. But I also
have like her childhood photographs. Like one of the things
I learned just through getting that box of papers was
that Francis dressed as a boy when she was a
little girl. So I thought was really fascinating. You know,
(19:50):
in the nineteen tens and nineteen twenties, she dressed as
a boy and her parents called her Frank. And so
I have some of these old black and white pictures
in my house in frames, and my kids are like,
who's this Is this a great great grandparent? You know,
I'm like, no, this is Francis. I've made my family
go to her grave. I mean, I'm pretty I'm in
deep with her. The other thing is that when I
(20:11):
was writing that book, The Engagements, I did a lot
of research at the Slessenger Library and Cambridge, which is
this wonderful archive of American women, and they have the
papers of Julia Child and Amelia Earhart and all these
fascinating historical figures we all know. And I thought a
lot about Francis when I was there, because she always
(20:33):
felt like she did not get the recognition she deserved
during her career, and so it was sort of a
dream of mine to eventually create an archive for Francis
at the Slessenger Library, which I have done in the
last couple of years. So now you can go there
and all the secret company memos. If anyone wants to
see them, they have to go to Francis Garrity's archive
(20:55):
at the Slessinger Librzing. And of course Jane in the
Cliffs is an archivist at this lessons Our Library. So
I knew when I went there now twelve years ago
that I really would love to include it in a book,
because I think they too, are sort of really hooked
into that idea that the moment a woman is born
will determine a lot of who she's allowed to become.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Courtney, your work reminds us of the paradoxical nature of life,
like how life can be sometimes ephemeral and also everlasting
at the same time as you explore the linkages and
connections between the women that are in your stories. So
(21:39):
what do you want readers to know about how to
make the most of their moment?
Speaker 5 (21:45):
I just think so much of it is about constantly
returning to like what a little speck we are, you know,
each of us is, and in the long story of
the planet and our species and all of that, you know,
we can get so hung up and so stressed out
by the smallest things, myself very much included. I'm not
as enlightened as I would like to be, but I mean,
(22:07):
it's so funny, one of my favorite things to do,
and it's kind of started. I started writing this book
almost exactly four years ago, and it was I don't
know if you remember what was going on in the
summer of twenty twenty, but we were all kind of
cooped up and at the time my kids were really little.
My daughter was like eighteen months old and my son
wasn't even three, and it was just completely bananas. You
(22:30):
couldn't take kids anywhere, and we were living near Albany,
New York. So the two places that we could go
and just kind of like let them run free that
were close to where we lived were the cemetery and
the Shaker Village, which then of course made its way
into this book too. And I love going to cemeteries
(22:51):
because they just put in perspective. I feel like you
walk your cemetery, at least I do. I always end
up feeling full of hope and full of kind of like, Okay,
my problems aren't that bad because I'm here, I still have,
you know, time to go. The other day, I was
having a terrible day and my husband's like, do you
need to go to a cemetery? And I was like,
you really get me.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Yes, we always say touch grass here on the bright side,
but maybe we should be saying touch graves.
Speaker 5 (23:19):
Maybe that's touch grass in a cemetery. Honestly, yeah, yeah,
very great?
Speaker 3 (23:23):
Is it that it's like you are?
Speaker 2 (23:25):
It reminds you of like what to do with that
dash between the dates?
Speaker 5 (23:29):
Yes, And it's crazy because you see you think, oh
my gosh, this person only had you know, whatever it
was twenty two years or sixty five years, no matter
what the number of years. It usually doesn't feel long enough.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
We have to take another short break, but we'll be
back in just a minute.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
Don't go anywhere. We're back with author j. Courtney Sullivan.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
Well, every month we invite our Reese's Book Club authors
to share a passage from their novels. So will you
share with us? Can you set up this scene for us?
Speaker 5 (24:08):
Would love to so bringing us back to the sort
of idea that this novel started with a house. Maybe
ten or twelve summers ago. Now, my husband and I
and our two friends were driving around in southern Maine
and we came upon this abandoned house. It was just
so mysterious. It was beautiful. It was perched on a
(24:29):
cliff on the ocean and fully furnished down to paintings
on the walls and rugs on the floors. And like
every kid who ever read Ralstein or Pardi Boys or
Nancy Drew or even just watch Scooby Doo is like,
what happened here? I need more information? And so we
kept going back every summer. We were fascinated, why is
(24:49):
this house abandoned? And you know who lived here? And
where did they go? And why did they leave? And
why did they leave in such a hurry. After a
few years, we arrived once and the house was gone,
and in its place was the foundation of this massive
mic mansion. And the house that was built in its place,
(25:10):
to my mind, was pretty soulless. So in the cliffs Jane,
who has always loved her whole life this old, abandoned house.
The summer that she moves home, she comes to find
that it's been renovated. It's been made into just kind
of an open concept, all white, boring thing by this woman, Genevieve.
(25:32):
In this passage, Jane is at Genevieve's house for the
first time, so it's the first time she's been at
the house in its new incarnation. On their way outside,
Jane excused herself to use the new bathroom on the
first floor, the powder room, Genevieve called it. She didn't
(25:53):
actually need the bathroom, she just wanted a moment to herself.
The space was small and windows with ridiculous wallpaper, black
with a pattern of hot pink flamingos that made her
dizzy to look at. Jane supposed it must be fashionable,
or else Genevieve wouldn't have chosen it. But to her
it fell off. Two pages from Main Coast magazine hung
(26:17):
on the wall, matted side by side in a gilded frame.
It took her a minute to comprehend why the cover
shot was familiar. She was looking at a picture of
the house. She was standing in that open kitchen, all
that white history meets modernity when an eighteen forty six
beach house gets a makeover. Jane read the opposite page,
(26:41):
which contained a lot of quotes from Genevieve and her
decorator about the many lengths to which they had gone
to honor the house's legacy. Perplexing, she thought, given that
they hadn't really There was a sidebar about Genevieve's purchase
of a Native American basket, presumed to have been made
in the middle of the nineteenth century right here in
(27:02):
southern Maine. Missus Richards bought the treasured Abenaki basket from
an au adapt whit based antique stealer. I saw it
and fell in love. It was so beautiful. I had
to have it, she recalled. Jane thought of the baskets
she had seen at the exhibit in Portland a few
days earlier, created by people who each came from a
(27:25):
long line of basket makers intent on preserving their traditions.
This house, as designed by Genevieve didn't feel like a
satisfying final destination for such a creation. She understood completely
now why Genevieve irked Allison so much. Even so, Jane
(27:45):
couldn't quite believe she was here in this place she
had once known so intimately, not trespassing on to some
stranger's land now, but invited in going up the stairs
without fear of falling through through them, flushing a toilet,
about to enjoy some nibbles on the patio, as Genevieve
(28:06):
had said, honestly, who said nibbles? Jane took a deep breath.
She opened the bathroom door and went toward the back
patio where Genevieve and Benjamin were waiting. Passing through the
big open space between the white kitchen and the white
family room, Jane saw the basket sitting on the coffee table.
(28:28):
She went right up to it. The braeding had a
pattern of dark blue birds around the rim. To Jane,
the basket radiated story. She wondered where it had been
these past two hundred years, where exactly it was made,
and by whom.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
I have such a clear visual When you say the
basket radiated story. I love that phrase.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
It feels like very metaphorical as well for the ethos
of your writing. Have some listener and reader questions for you,
and so let's hear what Shanna from Oklahoma had to say.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
Hi.
Speaker 7 (29:08):
I'm Shanna from Oklahoma. I'm a school librarian and I've
been trying to take my son to all fifty states
and last summer we actually went to Maine and your
book helped me to go back to those places. And
I love that in your book you have a quote
that says it never failed to astonish Jane that an event,
a local tragedy, could shape an entire generation and then
(29:29):
be forgotten. I feel like stories like yours help these
things to not be forgotten. And I was wondering if
there was an event in your life or in the
world that you've noticed that you feel like isn't discussed
enough and might be forgotten itself.
Speaker 5 (29:44):
Oh. I love that question, Shanna. Thank you so much.
And also I just want to say that school librarians
are my favorite people. Our school librarian is just a
total hero and he is improving the lives of kids
every day. In ways big and small. So thank you
for what you do and thank you for your question.
(30:06):
In my book Maine, my second novel, that's when I
kind of started thinking about this because in Boston in
the nineteen forties, there was a fire that really shaped
that whole generation of people in the city of Boston.
It was at the Coconut Grove nightclub, and my great
(30:28):
grandfather was a firefighter. He reported to the scene of
that fire believing that one of his daughters was inside,
which she was not. There were so many, almost five
hundred young people who died in that fire, and so
people in Boston talked about it, knew about it. It
was passed down in my family and many other families.
(30:50):
So I wanted to incorporate the Coconut Grove into the
story of the novel main but I almost felt like
is it over told? And so I sent this email
to maybe like thirty people, all of them in their
twenties and thirties, and all of them from the Boston area,
and said, do you know about the Coconut Grove fire?
(31:12):
And to my great surprise, I think only two people
said yes, I've heard of that. That was so astonishing
to me that something that had shaped a whole generation
of people in Boston, and this is just in one city,
let alone the whole country or the whole world. Two
generations later, it was sort of all but forgotten. And
so that was probably the first time that I decided
(31:34):
I want to uplift the stories of real people who
have been forgotten. And so in that story, in that novel,
all the characters who are in the coconut grove, who
die in the coconut grove or survive were all real
people other than the main characters of the book.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
That was one of my favorite parts of being a reporter,
was just telling real people's story.
Speaker 5 (31:58):
I goth me too.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
Yeah, it really is. It really is. Everyone has such
a rich story they just have to be uncovered. But
you did bring up main character, and our next listener, Ashley,
has a question about that and the state of Maine itself.
Speaker 6 (32:16):
Hi, Courtney, can you talk about the state of Maine
and how you have managed to make the state really
a main character in your books. How has your perception
of the state and your relationship with the state evolved
as you've written more books using the state as a
backdrop and a main character.
Speaker 3 (32:37):
That's a good question, and it's so good.
Speaker 5 (32:40):
Yeah. So I grew up in Massachusett. It's not far
from Maine at all, about a ninety minute drive to
southern Maine. And you know, every summer of my life,
I've gone to Maine for some portion of time, whether
it's with my parents and my sister when I was
a little girl, now with my own children and my husband,
(33:02):
between those two, with my best friend, and still with
my best friend. So I feel like when I go
to Maine, you know, I see all these different versions
of myself there. When I am in a gun Quit,
there's like a little patch of beach that every time
I walk by it, I remember being twelve years old
lying there with my grandmother on that beach that we
(33:23):
both happened to finish the novels we were reading at
the same time, and so we switched. And my grandmother
has been gone for so many years, but whenever I'm there,
I can just like see her there. I'm sitting there
writing a story. And so I think when we have
these places where we go, particularly on vacation, it's easier
(33:45):
to access those memories because it's such a small portion
of our overall lives and generally a more contemplative, laid back,
you know, version of ourselves. But with this book, I
really wanted to probe more deeply into the history of Maine. Now,
(34:05):
when you cross into Maine from New Hampshire, there's a
big sign that says welcome to Maine, vacation Land. But
of course that is true for those of us who
are tourists in Maine, but there's a much broader, larger
story to be told there. The Abbey Museum in bar Harbor,
which is a museum of Wabanaki history, the indigenous people
(34:26):
of Maine. They have on the homepage of their website,
not just vacation Land homeland. And I think a big
part of this book is not just about history and
what is forgotten, what isn't told, but also what are
we willing to grapple with and what are we willing
to receive? Because history is only as good as those
(34:47):
of us who are currently living and are willing to
learn about it and experience it and you know, evolve
from it. So I think that's kind of where I
am with Maine right now, and writing this book allowed
me to learn so much more about Maine and go
to so many more places than I'd ever been. And
(35:09):
I'm actually going to Maine for nine days of book
tour tomorrow, and I feel like, wow, I plan that beautifully.
I get to go to Maine for nine days for
work in July. What could be better? I mean, look
at this.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
You went there as a kid growing up with your grandma,
and now you get to do it and get paid
for it and do what you love at the same time.
So cool.
Speaker 3 (35:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
Well, thank you so much for sharing women's stories and
for sharing your story here with us.
Speaker 3 (35:38):
We appreciate your time.
Speaker 5 (35:40):
Thank you so much, with such a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
Thank you so much, Courtney, Thank you.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
J Courtney Sullivan is a New York Times bestselling author
and the July pick for Reese's Book Club. Her latest novel,
The Cliffs, is available wherever you get books.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
Listen along to The Cliffs on Apple Books, Reese's Book
Club's official audiobook home. Thank you to our bright Side
besties Shanna and Ashley for joining our book club today.
We'll be announcing the August Pick for Reese's Book Club
next week, so stay tuned for your next go to read, y'all,
and as always, you can send your author questions to
Hello at the Brightside podcast dot com. Well that's it
(36:23):
for today's show. Tomorrow, we've got award winning economist Emily
Oster joining us. She is talking all about the challenges
of pregnancy and parenting from a data driven perspective. Plus
she's answering your questions. So don't miss our conversation with
this New York Times bestselling author. Thanks to our partners
at Airbnb.
Speaker 2 (36:42):
Listen and follow the bright Side on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
I'm Simone Boye. You can find me at Simone Voice
on Instagram and TikTok.
Speaker 3 (36:53):
Danielle Robe on Instagram and TikTok. That's ro Ba.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
Y see you tomorrow, folks. Keep looking on the bright side.
Host
Simone Boyce
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