January 14, 2025 • 32 mins
In this episode Brett sits down with writer Tom Lamont to discuss his debut novel, "Going Home". They talk about the all consuming challenges of raising kids, writing as a novelist vs journalist, fathers, faith and being Jewish.
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http://tomlamontjournalist.com/
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https://www.instagram.com/tom_lamont_journalist/?hl=en
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Brett Benner (00:00):
Hey, everybody.
(00:00):
It's Brett.
And welcome back to behind thestack.
My first author interview of2025.
But before we get into that,there are a few new releases
that are coming out today that Iwanted to highlight.
One is Alice Feeney's BeautifulUgly.
This is a really fun book.
Thriller.
Alice Feeney is the queen of themysterious narratives and what
(00:23):
you know and what you don'tknow.
It's really fun.
Also speaking of fun, GradyHendrix.
Witchcraft for wayward girls.
Grady Hendrix tackles witches inthis latest book.
Tracy Lang has a new book, WhatHappened to the Craze, and
speculative author NnendiOkorafor comes out with her new
book, Death by the Author.
(00:43):
Author Sarah Sligar's new bookVantage Point.
Another mystery thriller, andfor those of you who are Josh
Gad fans, he has a new biographycalled In Gad We Trust.
And lastly, Daniel Black, hisnew novel Isaac's Song comes out
today.
Personally, I really liked hisprevious novel, Don't Cry For
Me, so I'm really lookingforward to this one.
(01:05):
And of course, all of thesebooks that I just rattled off
will be up on my bookshop.
org page so you can check themall out there and purchase them
there as well.
Now, my first guest on the show,this is also his release day.
It's author Tom Lamont with hisnew book, Going Home, a little
bit about Tom.
(01:26):
Tom Lamont is an award winningjournalist and one of the
founding writers for TheGuardian's Longreads.
He is the interviewer of choicefor Adele and Harry Styles,
having written in depth aboutboth of these musicians since
they first emerged to fame inthe 2010s.
He's been a regularcorrespondent for American GQ.
He lives in North London withhis wife and two children.
(01:48):
Going Home is his debut novel.
Enjoy this episode of Behind theStack.
Thank you so much for being heretoday.
I absolutely loved your book.
And so I'm so thrilled thatyou're here.
And also I should just say thankyou to the wonderful Jenny
Jackson, who, was instrumental,and she sent me this and she
said, you have to read this.
(02:08):
And, and it's funny because I.
had been following the, theGuardian list of which you were
one of the 10 new novelists of2024 to watch.
And I was obsessed with thatlist.
It's, it's a fantastic group ofauthors.
Tom Lamont (02:23):
Yeah.
It's like, um, yeah, it feels abit like the arbitrary date they
give to you, the release date ofyour book kind of groups you
with a generational slice.
And it's quite fun to sort ofwork out through your first year
who your peers are, you know,and I guess in a way you'll
always be connected to them.
It's like the class of 2024 or2025.
And I guess, yeah, I'll alwayssort of have that lovely like
(02:45):
filament connecting me to those10 other writers.
Brett Benner (02:48):
Yeah.
What a great group.
So congratulations.
I'm
Tom Lamont (02:50):
glad, you know, Jenny and that, that was the
link here.
Cause I mean, I, I, I've sort ofslowly realizing how lucky I've
been to have.
Such a rounded figure, she'sshepherding this book up to an
American audience.
You know, she's this incredibleeditor with a, with a starry
reputation.
And she's absolutely seen theprocess from the other side,
from the writer, from theauthor's perspective, having
(03:12):
written, published an incrediblysuccessful book herself.
And I feel like she's, she'sthis incredible resource for,
for a newbie like me to, to, tobe able to sort of tap into.
I like, I just love picking herbrain.
Brett Benner (03:23):
So do you have an elevator pitch for the book that
you can give us?
Tom Lamont (03:26):
Oh, sure.
Um, so we're in an elevator andI'm describing to you the
basics.
Yeah, exactly.
Brett Benner (03:32):
And it can be, if you want, this could be a very
tall building.
So,
Tom Lamont (03:35):
okay.
So we've got a few floor big,maybe, maybe like a Vegas casino
sort of thing.
The story starts from theperspective of a young man, in
his thirties, a Londoner calledTeo, who, goes home to the North
London suburbs where he grew upfor what he thinks will be a
pretty routine weekend carevisit to see his ailing dad, a
guy called Vic.
(03:56):
But while he's there, somethingdramatic happens.
He ends up having to stay muchlonger than he intended, and he
ends up having to care for a twoyear old boy, a kid called Joel,
who finds himself without reallyanyone else to look after him.
And the story from that pointrevolves around Joel, who looks
after him and how.
There's Teo, a sort of reluctantparental figure stepping into an
(04:20):
absence.
There's Teo's best friend Ben,the least reliable person in his
message groups.
Uh, a bit of a hedonist and anarcissist, kind of a bloody
nightmare.
Someone.
you would say at the outset isjust about the least equipped to
be involved in the raising of aimpressionable vulnerable child,
(04:41):
but who nevertheless forceshimself to get involved.
Vic, the father figure, who hassome regrets about his own
parenting journey, his own timeas a, as a father in his 30s and
40s, takes the arrival of Joelin his house as a kind of second
opportunity to try again as a,as a parent.
(05:01):
And then there's a fourth adultcharacter, her name's Sybil,
she's uh, friendly with Vic, shegets to know the younger men,
and she in her own way becomesinvolved in Joel's continuing
care over about a year.
I feel like the book is sort ofrippled with melancholy, but on
the whole I A joyful book.
(05:24):
I wanted an uplifting book.
I wanted a book that was honestabout the, uh, granular
experience of parenting from theperspective
Brett Benner (05:32):
of
Tom Lamont (05:32):
entirely unprepared people.
That's how I experiencedbecoming a parent.
I got run over by it.
I got hit.
By the truck of it, overnight,and learned everything as I
went, as a lot of people do, asmy parents probably did, as your
parents probably did.
Any number of, um, parentingstories, as different as they
are in their specifics,generally involve headlong
(05:56):
education in how not to let achild die.
and really Joel, the two yearold is the beating heart of the
story and the care, the need forhim to be looked after, to be
raised, to be steered, to beentertained, to be fed, to be
picked up, to be put backtogether again.
that's the, Thrust of the book.
Brett Benner (06:16):
And we've arrived.
Yeah, it's beautiful.
It's funny because yesterday,when I was writing down some
stuff from this, there was anarticle and now I'm sounding so
Hollywood.
There was an article on theHollywood reporter.
Talking about some of the stateof current television right now.
And it was talking about, threetelevision shows in particular,
shrinking, which is a show thatI actually work on.
(06:37):
And then this show, somebodysomewhere, that's on HBO.
And then the last one was, a maninside, which is a new Ted
Danson show on Netflix and thatset in a, retirement community.
But.
The article was talking aboutbridging the comedy with,
melancholy and sadness and thesuccess of that with all three
(06:57):
of these shows.
But it made me think of thisbecause one of the things that
the journalist said in the end,what works and what this is too,
is there is a collective empathywithout slipping into
sentimentality.
And that made a lot of sense.
With this to me, because itreally could have been maudlin
and also, kind of cloying andsweet with the sun.
(07:18):
And I feel like you really avoidall that in such a great way
that it is very moving, but it'salso so funny.
I mean, there's parts of it thatare like really, really, really
funny with these characters andalso Hugely identifiable, like
you just said, for anybody who'sbeen a parent
Tom Lamont (07:36):
Thank you for saying all that, Brett.
And, and I do, but I do want itto be, I always knew if I was
going to write about parentingsmall children, there was sort
of a few hurdles I knew I wasplacing in front of myself that
I'd have to get over.
One of them was, I absolutelywanted this to be a novel that,
you know, People could enjoywhatever their own engagement
with small children, withparenting or not.
(07:59):
And secondly, I just absolutelypoliced myself against as well
as I could police myself againstletting the two year old boy
become Chloe because, you know,kids are as in life in fiction,
a bit of a nightmare can be abit of a nightmare.
You know, there's, there's manya book I've sent sort of
spinning across the room becauseI just can't bear the child.
(08:19):
I don't believe them.
I've never met one like thesefictional kids.
And I really, really challengedmyself to try and get down.
Essentially my son, my son whenhe was two and the Extraordinary
and utterly ordinary ways thathe approached the world, the
sort of estranged middle statebetween being expressive and
(08:43):
baffling, between verbal andnonverbal, between independence
and total dependence.
It was a very particular momentin childhood I wanted to
capture.
Kind of a part of childhood Ithink none of us really remember
in ourselves, just slightlybefore memory, long term memory
kicks in, but which it's sobeguiling when you meet it, that
age, this is sort of that rogue,I guess in England we call them
(09:05):
toddlers, you know, because theytoddle, they go everywhere,
they're impossible to keep upwith, they have their first
taste of motion, of ofexploration, of naughtiness, and
they are at their mostexhausting, and at their most
magical, and so all of that Itried to bind up in Joel, but I
hope it is a story that anyonecan relate to, Read and get get
(09:25):
something out of because it'salso about the other end of
parenting the the saying goodbyeto one's own parents And sure
that is something that forbetter or worse almost everyone
will go through it has beenthrough it came out of a time in
my life as I was writing itwhere I felt very much sort of
arms distance from both, youknow, my, my little boy was
(09:47):
getting older.
My dad was dying and it was allhappening at the same time.
And at a certain point theyjust.
They were essentially the sametype of human, their needs were
the same, to care for them wasreally similar.
And I just wanted to put somefiction in that place, that
strange moment in a life whenyou can see almost both ends of
(10:09):
it, you're meeting, two peopleare almost meeting on a journey
in and out.
Brett Benner (10:12):
Yeah, my father.
Passed when my son was firstborn.
In fact, my parents were outvisiting in Los Angeles.
It's the first time that he hadseen him and he died that week
while he was here.
And, it's such a strange momentto All of a sudden, recognize
the journey.
(10:32):
as a parent, but you're alsostill a son.
And you're almost sandwichedbetween these two realities of
learning to or discovering howto parent yourself while also
watching your father, in thiscase for, for you, it's weird,
isn't it?
It's, it's very strange.
Tom Lamont (10:52):
It's a deeply weird phase, because also I think a
lot of people, me included,learn a new type of forgiveness
for your own parents.
When you become a parentyourself, you suddenly
understand it.
You understand so much moreabout the decisions they made,
the ways they frustrated you,the limits that were put on your
life, the rollercoaster of the,of the journey.
(11:13):
And I'm sorry, in your case.
That's heartbreaking as asituation to be in because you
were probably learning all thesethings about dadhood in, in this
case, the mix and the mess ofthat.
And you lost him incrediblyquickly, too quickly well, in my
case, it prompted newconversations with my father,
you know, just about, it mademe, you know, much more, much
(11:33):
more sympathetic.
And, it was like, you suddenlysaw the, the answers on the back
of the page, you know, yousuddenly, saw your own childhood
in greater depth in the round.
Brett Benner (11:45):
Absolutely.
And I think you have a, if notan understanding completely, at
least I don't want to saysympathy, but a kind of reality
of everybody's just human andthey were probably trying to do
the best that they were capableof doing in whatever
circumstances they were given atthis time.
You said that the character ofVic, some of it was inspired by
your father and, and thatsituation, and I've read,
(12:07):
another interview with you whereyou said, you know, your father
was not a meddler like Vic is,do you think if your dad read
it, he would have recognizedhimself?
Do you think he would have likedthe character of Vic?
Tom Lamont (12:18):
That's a really lovely question.
I, I have thought about itbecause I know the page I was
writing when he died.
I wrote it kind ofchronologically and I can sort
of see, I've got a book in frontof me now and I can sort of see
the moment in the book where hepassed away.
I write every day.
I wrote that morning of hisdeath, the day he died and I
wrote the day after.
We knew he was dying and I sortof knew that the time track I
(12:38):
was on, he was probably nevergoing to read it.
And That did allow a certainfreedom in writing a character
that drew certainly heavily onhis biography and his personal
experiences in life.
As I write in theAcknowledgements, I made some
pretty chunky changes to the, tothe, to the character of this
father figure, of, of Vic,because in order to make the
(12:58):
plot go, I needed I needed myfictional Vic to be a meddler,
as you quoted.
He needs to get involved a fewtimes, not always to the
advantage of everyone concerned.
So your question was, would herecognize himself and would he
like it?
I know that he would.
Brim with pride, just about thefact of the book and about the
fact of it being published.
(13:20):
I don't think he would recognizecertain parts of the
descriptions.
And I think he would be alarmedat other things, other
observations.
As you or I would when ourchildren grow up and write about
us.
But, but I think he would likethe character.
I think he would, as a lot ofreaders have fallen for Vic,
which I'm really pleased about,because he's, he makes a mess of
(13:42):
things a few times.
I think my dad, who wasn't aterrifically hungry reader, was
very empathetic and gave me avery solid grounding in trying
to think about things throughother people's eyes.
experiences, you know, just tryand walk in other people's
shoes, which is the root ofempathy, which is the root of
being a human, really.
(14:03):
And he was a great teacher ofthat.
And so I think he would vibewith Vic.
Yeah, I want to think so.
Luckily, I've never really hadto Find out though, you know,
these, I don't know how other, Idon't know how other authors go
through this.
I mean, you've, you've met them,you've interviewed them, you
know, when you capture people oraspects of people or slivers of
people and put them on the pageand they're still alive to read
(14:23):
it.
What must that be like?
How'd you, what's the nextSunday lunch?
Like, you know,
Brett Benner (14:27):
deny, deny, deny.
Tom Lamont (14:30):
Yeah.
Well, it's like, what's theZuckerberg line?
It's like, move quickly andbreak things.
Yeah, you fake it till you makeit.
Brett Benner (14:35):
I think I'd be more concerned If I was the
person that you modeled Ben offof, then I, I would be like, um,
uh, hello?
Tom Lamont (14:43):
Well, a lot, a lot of, a lot of readers of the book
have told me there were Ben's intheir own lives and
Brett Benner (14:48):
there's been in everybody's life.
That's the thing.
Tom Lamont (14:51):
And a lot of them are dated Ben's.
A lot of the women are datedBen's still, half burned, half
sort of, yearning for him.
Brett Benner (14:58):
Sure.
No, he's incredibly charming andjust incredibly self involved,
which is kind of what his appealis, you know, too.
Tom Lamont (15:05):
Well, I think we, we, I, I'm not like that at all.
And I think there is an appealfor passive people, for quiet
people, for introverts, to be,to have an extrovert, to have
the energy of someone a littlenarcissistic in their life,
because it's so propulsive, it'sso exciting.
You pay the consequences, butyou also just get to go along
(15:28):
for the ride a bit, you know,and I think I learned writing
this book that in a narrativethat involves multiple
characters in a, in a novel likethis one, you really want a few.
fuel sources, a few sources ofpropulsion of energy.
And I remember kind of lovingsettling into another Ben
chapter as I was, when I wasdeep underway on the writing of
(15:49):
this, because I would tinglewith a bit of that energy, you
know, the bit of the energy thatI don't otherwise possess a kind
of sure.
They care.
Hmm.
Brett Benner (15:57):
Are you more of a Teo?
Tom Lamont (15:58):
Teo, so yeah, so Teo's uh, quite, quite dutiful,
quite auxiliary, if we weregoing to enter the sort of
manosphere blog terminology, heis a baiter, and has recognized
this and resigned himself to it.
The world don't go aroundwithout baiters, you know, and
childcare, which is a huge partof this book.
It only happens with theresponsible, with the dutiful,
(16:18):
and you can't tell, you can'ttell the story of a, even a
moderately successful parentingjourney without one or more
dutiful people.
And so I wanted to try and teaseout through Teo's journey and
Teo's story, some of the drama,some of the glamour, some of the
grandeur in that, with a twoyear old kid.
(16:39):
You have to be there, in themiddle of the night, you know,
opening the band aid, you haveto be telling them the same
story, reassuring the samefears.
On a Tuesday morning, you arepushing those swings again and
again and again.
If that doesn't get done, thejob doesn't get done, you know?
And I I've always been quite,uh, feminine, I think in my
(17:03):
viewpoints.
I've always, I'm lucky.
I've had really strong women inmy life, great friends.
I've been with my wife for along time and.
I think there's lots of mistakesor things I did as a young
parent that I, you know,possibly wouldn't do again with
experience.
But I know that I came into itvery much like bolstered by not
being a kind of wild,uncontainable, extremely
(17:28):
masculine dad who just couldn'tbear the idea of domesticity.
There was a big part of me thatCould and would do that and see
the, try and enjoy the journeyof that and the granular
experience of that.
I mean, I, I would love to thinkthat one or two readers from
this, who were unsure abouttheir capabilities, unsure about
the limitations of parentingwould read this book and see
(17:50):
that it isn't, it's its ownworld.
It's the next adventure, youknow, it's a really amazing
thing to go through,
Brett Benner (17:57):
Oh my God.
It's.
It's the best.
And, and when you're in it,you're like, dear God, how will
I ever get through this?
And because there is no manualfor everything is so individual,
but it's literally like, hangon, here we go, because you
don't know what you're gettingin any facet of it.
And one of the things thatpeople will say it is it never
(18:19):
ends.
It never ends.
It gets better.
The dynamic changes and as theycontinue to become themselves,
that's truly magical.
And as they are as people, andyou begin to relate to them
differently, and hope thatwhatever you do next will not
send them into therapy for thenext 10 years,
Tom Lamont (18:37):
I'll be coming out on the couch.
I've come to think thatparenting The reason it's so
hard to put yourself into itbefore it happens, it's kind of
like illness or bereavement.
It's the totality of it.
You can't, it's very hard forthe human brain to imagine 24
hours, nonstop indefinitely.
You can imagine an hour ofstress.
(18:58):
You can imagine a day of pain.
It's very hard to, or pleasure.
You can, and it's very hard tojust see the, sort of infinity
of parenting or certainly whatfeels like infinity unfurling in
front of you.
And, no matter how much I triedin the buildup, it wasn't till
day one, minute one, that youstart, you start to understand.
Brett Benner (19:18):
So I'm just so curious, what was the Genesis
for you for the story?
Like where, where did this come
Tom Lamont (19:23):
I feel kind of like a geriatric debutante in a way,
being in my early forties, butthat's partly because I, I'm a
journalist in my daily life.
That's been my, been my career,been my shaped a lot of my
personality and It's been thebackground of my, of my adult
life.
But I have been trying to writenovels for a long time, and I've
(19:44):
written a couple to completionthat didn't quite work, weren't
really it, never found homes,never, were never bought, I say
all this to explain that Thisbook, Going Home, which is my
first published book, is verymuch the first novel I finished
that felt right, felt it worked,felt real, true, and partly that
(20:05):
was because the previous work Iwas trying to do was very much
drawn from kind of a off cut, anoverspill from journalism, I
would do a rich piece ofreporting, spend a lot of time
diving into a subject to write along piece of narrative
nonfiction, and I will be leftwith this kind of pool of excess
and interests and, um, questionsand fascinations.
(20:28):
You asked where this book camefrom, and it really came from
some frank conversations with,my agent, Jane Finnegan, and
with a couple of editors inLondon, including the editor who
finally bought this book, FedeAndonino.
Where they basically said, thebits in you that work as a
fiction writer are actuallyquite far from the journalist in
(20:48):
you and they're intimate,they're quiet, they're close,
they're domestic, they'reinterpersonal, they're about
people, small groups of people.
These are the bits that works,not the societal howls where
you're wearing your journalistichat and you want to point out
all the, the ills and it wasjust so clarifying for me to
hear that.
(21:08):
I mean, depressing initially,and sort of like as good a punch
in the stomach as I've ever had,probably.
And after the sort of ache wentaway, and I was able to sort of
figuratively stand up straightagain, I just got to work on
something totally different thatwas very close to home, was
absolutely drawn from livedexperience was set in the part
(21:33):
of London where I grew up.
it's about secular Judaism andlosing your faith.
Experiences I've had or beenadjacent to.
It's about, as we've discussed,a little boy who, you know,
I've, I've had one and it'sabout the way friendship kind of
evolves and sometimesdeteriorates from school onwards
as you as you yourself leavechildhood and enter adulthood
(21:55):
these bonds you've made can theycan be enriched for sure but
they can curdle as well andsometimes both these were all
things in the stew as i startedto write it i, I just, I went
away and wrote for 18 monthsevery day, didn't stop every
morning, didn't stop.
And where I was writing from wasjust totally different.
It was from, it was from theheart and the spine, you know,
it wasn't really so much thehead and, I could feel from, The
(22:18):
process of it, that it was, itwas right.
And, I just felt confident inwhat it was, I felt it was real.
It wasn't like, scraps.
It felt like it held together.
It's art, as a journalist,you're constantly leaning on the
rails of fact and place and timeand moving through time.
And a novel can be anything it'sephemeral and you make the
internal logic, you build theuniverse, however big or small
(22:40):
it is.
And, so it has to come from adifferent place, I think.
And so I guess I spent mythirties.
making mistakes that help meunderstand where it has to come
from.
And if it's had that effect onyou, as I'm delighted to hear
you say it has, that's becauseof that time.
I think that's because of that,that.
learning process that I'm gladto have gone through.
Brett Benner (22:58):
That's awesome.
One of the things you mentionedthat I wanted to ask you about
was The Judaic element in thebook.
You have these characters whoare all Jewish and it's not a
plot point necessarily oranything like that.
I mean, one of the characters,Sybil is a rabbi and she's such
a fantastic character that Iwanted to talk a little bit more
about in a second, but where didthat decision come for?
I know that your mother wasJewish and your father was
(23:20):
Scottish Catholic.
Tom Lamont (23:22):
Yeah.
I felt slightly like I hadn'treally read it before.
You know, my mom was raised in apretty liberal, pretty secular
Jewish family, a massive NorthLondon family, very close, very
loving, still are still enormousnumbers of us.
And my dad, Was, raised in care,in Scotland and at the time
(23:45):
being raised in care where hegrew up meant being raised by
nuns, you know, within theCatholic church that did it for
him in religion.
He was very circumspect about,what he would say, or the
memories he was willing to tapinto from this time.
It was an enormous and tragicstretch of time in his childhood
from a horrendously young age.
But I had as a journalist, I hadthe extremely strange experience
(24:07):
of happening upon a governmentreport about the care home he
was in that was, put togetherretrospectively by the Scottish
government.
So I did get to find out some ofwhat he'd been through and yeah,
I mean, at the very least of it,I understood why he was a lapsed
for sure.
But I think he, when he met mymom, he was pretty deep into his
life.
He was in his thirties and henever really had a biological
(24:28):
family and he'd had some piecesof, um, adopted families and
bits of experience, I know hewas magnetized to what my mom
had, which was dozens of people,a warmth, a spirit and energy
of, of a big, cacophonousfamily.
He kind of had this strange.
Non converting conversion.
He never took up the religion.
(24:49):
He never tried to apply for thatprocess you can go through to
convert.
He just sort of hung around it,and I think liked it, and took
what he took out of it.
And so my brother and I wereraised in quite a funny kind of
mutt like religious way where mymum's family went, were
initially more religious thanthey then subsequently were, so
(25:11):
they were on their own journey,kind of out of faith.
My dad was just, came collidingin from the side as a kind of
doubter and a skeptic and, butsomeone who loved the community
and they loved the warmth andthe ceremony and the occasion of
it.
And we were sort of raised inthis funny sort of in out space,
in a very, very culturallyJewish, certainly in our family
lives, but religion here andthere.
(25:33):
I was Bar Mitzvahed, which isfairly major religious rite of
passage to go through.
And at the same time, that wasmore or less the end of my sort
of academic religious engagementwith the synagogue I grew up in.
Sybil nominally the mostreligious as the community's
rabbi is on her own journeywith, with doubt, with loss of
(25:54):
faith.
And then Vic, I exaggerated andsome of my dad's own collision
into Judaism in that Vic lovesnothing more than to hang around
the synagogue.
He just likes to be a part ofit.
He's never, he's not, he's notof it.
He likes to be near it, thewarmth of it.
And that was Vic.
Pretty true to the spirit of myold man,
Brett Benner (26:14):
I've always felt like.
Judaism and the Jewish faith andJewish people, it does engender
such a sense of family andcommunity in a way that many
other religions don't, at least,certainly, I think, here in the
States.
And I've always been somewhatenvious of that there's just
such an incredible sense ofcommunity that's fostered and
it's so prevalent here.
(26:35):
I kept thinking of like thiswhole idea of it takes a village
in terms of raising a child, butalso just with that particular
community.
And, and that's why Sybil to meis such a great and wonderful
character because I love thatyou have this person who is
religious leader who you knowarguably we think they are going
(26:56):
to have all the answers and thisunwavering faith in whatever it
is but they're also human andthey're also faced with the fact
of having doubts about certainthings and Why things are
happening the way they are oryou know, whatever it is.
And she's so real and so human.
Tom Lamont (27:12):
Thank you.
Thank you.
She, she was the character I wasnervous isn't quite the right
word, but I was apprehensiveabout it because she's the only
woman I fully inhabit in thisbook.
I think that was a slightproblem of courage on my part,
and it's something I definitelyaddress in the future.
But it was partly a hesitancybecause I just didn't want to
(27:33):
get her wrong.
And I approached it partly bypulling from women I'm close to,
my wife included.
And partly there's just.
There's a lot of me at 40 in herbecause she's 10 years older
than the other characters.
I'm writing sort of As anauthor, I'm, I'm, I'm tapping
into my memory of what it waslike to be in my early thirties
(27:56):
to write the two main malecharacters in the book.
And with Sybil, she's ten yearson from then, and I get to be
sort of me now, almost sort of,checking in with the young, the
youngins.
And, just having that little bitmore sense of myself.
I mean, in her case, she'shaving these doubts.
She's going, it's the sametragedy that prompts the dilemma
(28:17):
of Joel's care that promptsSybil to question her faith.
And, although she is goingthrough something, That would be
traumatic to happen to areligious person, a person who's
chosen to be a religious leader,as they're calling.
To lose your faith, that's goingto be up there in the most
difficult things you can gothrough.
But I very much wanted her toConcurrent with that be know who
(28:44):
she is.
She's someone who knows who sheis, as I think I know who I am
in my forties in a way that Ihaven't done before necessarily.
So I'm so I'm delighted to hearyou responded to her like that.
Brett Benner (28:54):
It's also a real testament to kind of the staying
power of faith because havingsomething that would shake your
faith or make you really startto think and then to kind of dig
in and say, you know, as shedescribes it, or as you describe
in the book, She lost a means offluid conversation with God.
I loved that line.
So it's finding your way backand what is it that helps you
(29:16):
find your way back?
And I think so much of that thenbecomes rooted in her
interactions with Joel and Teoand with all of them in terms of
finding a sense of communityagain and finding a sense of
purpose and all of that, which Iloved.
I want to jump back to Joel andTao and going back to something
we were talking about in thebeginning, which is kind of the,
totality of, of raising a kidand something I, it just stuck
(29:37):
with me so much.
And, and I reread it last nightcause I just found it so moving
is this is such a simple thing,but it's the nighttime routine.
And, there's this great momentwhen Teo is laying next to Joel
in bed.
And he's talking to him and Joelis asking questions and
questions and Teo's trying toget him to go off.
(29:58):
And you captured this soincredibly well.
And later Teo is, is, Is talkingwith Ben and Ben says, you know,
I don't even know.
How do you know When they'vegone to sleep and he said you'll
know because the rhythm changesand I was like, that's it and
i've had those conversations andit was so right on and and I
remember sitting in a rockingchair in my son's room every
(30:21):
night and You know, he would betalking and you would just hear
him breathing.
And, and I kept thinking like,please just go down.
Please just go down.
Please just go down.
And one in one of two thingshappened.
I wanted him to fall asleepbefore I fell asleep in the
chair, because arguably then youwake up and your neck is stiff
and you're like, God damn it.
I've just, I've just wasted theentire evening because all you
(30:43):
want is to get them to a pointwhere you could get down and go
downstairs and maybe watchsomething on TV for a half hour
before you fall into sleep.
Yeah.
Right.
Okay.
And so I just love that.
It's so beautifully captured.
And the moment you think they'redone, I used to remember slowly
getting out of the chair andplease, and thinking to myself,
please don't creak, please don'tcreak, please don't creak.
And one fit hits the floor andall of a sudden he'd be like,
(31:04):
Papa.
Yeah, I'm here.
I'm here.
Tom Lamont (31:07):
I'm here, buddy.
I know.
It's.
It's like, um, you, um, and youcan't sound exasperated.
It's the one tone of voicethat's guaranteed to like, right
out of the depth.
Brett Benner (31:16):
Yes.
Tom Lamont (31:17):
I always thought of it as like, they're like, uh,
they need an S I think I putthis in the book, you know, they
need an escort to sleep.
They need, they need to bemarched to sleep as if you're
the police taking them to thestation and you're sort of
pushing their heads down to getthem into the back of a car.
And like, they just, they can'tbe, they can't be left alone in
those moments, but they kind ofwant to get there.
(31:37):
You definitely want to getthere.
And you, you get to know, youget to know every floorboard,
right?
You get to know, oh my God, it'sanother Creek of every chair,
but you also know, like, youtones and, you know, on their
part, there's the, there's thesnuffles and the rhythm of the
breathing on your part, youknow, that just the wrong kind
(31:57):
of voice can snap them back atback at, you're looking to
create this.
This strange, it's almost like atrick.
It's like a con.
It's like, it's like a long conyou're trying to play on them to
get them to just to let go ofthe rails of consciousness and
just go just drift off.
But the rewards are enormousbecause then you've got, oh,
you've got, you've got a fewhours, you know, you've got the
evening.
Brett Benner (32:16):
Yes, that's exactly right.
Um, well, Tom, I could literallysit here and talk to you all
day, but, I just want to thankyou again.
The book is fantastic.
It's a homecoming novel.
It's a family novel, both aboutfound family and given family,
and also a book about faith and,and, and childhood and
parenting.
So, um, please get it and polarbears.
(32:39):
Yes.
Yes.
Like, this is what I love somuch.
Cause people will look at thiscover and not understand it
exactly right away, but theresonance of this is, is
fantastic.
So congratulations.
For your success and for all ofthis, it's coming with it.
It's great.
And, and, um, and good luck withthat off.
Tom Lamont (32:54):
Thank you for having me, Brett.
This has been really fun.
Hey, everybody.
(00:00):
It's Brett.
And welcome back to behind thestack.
My first author interview of2025.
But before we get into that,there are a few new releases
that are coming out today that Iwanted to highlight.
One is Alice Feeney's BeautifulUgly.
This is a really fun book.
Thriller.
Alice Feeney is the queen of themysterious narratives and what
(00:23):
you know and what you don'tknow.
It's really fun.
Also speaking of fun, GradyHendrix.
Witchcraft for wayward girls.
Grady Hendrix tackles witches inthis latest book.
Tracy Lang has a new book, WhatHappened to the Craze, and
speculative author NnendiOkorafor comes out with her new
book, Death by the Author.
(00:43):
Author Sarah Sligar's new bookVantage Point.
Another mystery thriller, andfor those of you who are Josh
Gad fans, he has a new biographycalled In Gad We Trust.
And lastly, Daniel Black, hisnew novel Isaac's Song comes out
today.
Personally, I really liked hisprevious novel, Don't Cry For
Me, so I'm really lookingforward to this one.
(01:05):
And of course, all of thesebooks that I just rattled off
will be up on my bookshop.
org page so you can check themall out there and purchase them
there as well.
Now, my first guest on the show,this is also his release day.
It's author Tom Lamont with hisnew book, Going Home, a little
bit about Tom.
(01:26):
Tom Lamont is an award winningjournalist and one of the
founding writers for TheGuardian's Longreads.
He is the interviewer of choicefor Adele and Harry Styles,
having written in depth aboutboth of these musicians since
they first emerged to fame inthe 2010s.
He's been a regularcorrespondent for American GQ.
He lives in North London withhis wife and two children.
(01:48):
Going Home is his debut novel.
Enjoy this episode of Behind theStack.
Thank you so much for being heretoday.
I absolutely loved your book.
And so I'm so thrilled thatyou're here.
And also I should just say thankyou to the wonderful Jenny
Jackson, who, was instrumental,and she sent me this and she
said, you have to read this.
(02:08):
And, and it's funny because I.
had been following the, theGuardian list of which you were
one of the 10 new novelists of2024 to watch.
And I was obsessed with thatlist.
It's, it's a fantastic group ofauthors.
Tom Lamont (02:23):
Yeah.
It's like, um, yeah, it feels abit like the arbitrary date they
give to you, the release date ofyour book kind of groups you
with a generational slice.
And it's quite fun to sort ofwork out through your first year
who your peers are, you know,and I guess in a way you'll
always be connected to them.
It's like the class of 2024 or2025.
And I guess, yeah, I'll alwayssort of have that lovely like
(02:45):
filament connecting me to those10 other writers.
Brett Benner (02:48):
Yeah.
What a great group.
So congratulations.
I'm
Tom Lamont (02:50):
glad, you know, Jenny and that, that was the
link here.
Cause I mean, I, I, I've sort ofslowly realizing how lucky I've
been to have.
Such a rounded figure, she'sshepherding this book up to an
American audience.
You know, she's this incredibleeditor with a, with a starry
reputation.
And she's absolutely seen theprocess from the other side,
from the writer, from theauthor's perspective, having
(03:12):
written, published an incrediblysuccessful book herself.
And I feel like she's, she'sthis incredible resource for,
for a newbie like me to, to, tobe able to sort of tap into.
I like, I just love picking herbrain.
Brett Benner (03:23):
So do you have an elevator pitch for the book that
you can give us?
Tom Lamont (03:26):
Oh, sure.
Um, so we're in an elevator andI'm describing to you the
basics.
Yeah, exactly.
Brett Benner (03:32):
And it can be, if you want, this could be a very
tall building.
So,
Tom Lamont (03:35):
okay.
So we've got a few floor big,maybe, maybe like a Vegas casino
sort of thing.
The story starts from theperspective of a young man, in
his thirties, a Londoner calledTeo, who, goes home to the North
London suburbs where he grew upfor what he thinks will be a
pretty routine weekend carevisit to see his ailing dad, a
guy called Vic.
(03:56):
But while he's there, somethingdramatic happens.
He ends up having to stay muchlonger than he intended, and he
ends up having to care for a twoyear old boy, a kid called Joel,
who finds himself without reallyanyone else to look after him.
And the story from that pointrevolves around Joel, who looks
after him and how.
There's Teo, a sort of reluctantparental figure stepping into an
(04:20):
absence.
There's Teo's best friend Ben,the least reliable person in his
message groups.
Uh, a bit of a hedonist and anarcissist, kind of a bloody
nightmare.
Someone.
you would say at the outset isjust about the least equipped to
be involved in the raising of aimpressionable vulnerable child,
(04:41):
but who nevertheless forceshimself to get involved.
Vic, the father figure, who hassome regrets about his own
parenting journey, his own timeas a, as a father in his 30s and
40s, takes the arrival of Joelin his house as a kind of second
opportunity to try again as a,as a parent.
(05:01):
And then there's a fourth adultcharacter, her name's Sybil,
she's uh, friendly with Vic, shegets to know the younger men,
and she in her own way becomesinvolved in Joel's continuing
care over about a year.
I feel like the book is sort ofrippled with melancholy, but on
the whole I A joyful book.
(05:24):
I wanted an uplifting book.
I wanted a book that was honestabout the, uh, granular
experience of parenting from theperspective
Brett Benner (05:32):
of
Tom Lamont (05:32):
entirely unprepared people.
That's how I experiencedbecoming a parent.
I got run over by it.
I got hit.
By the truck of it, overnight,and learned everything as I
went, as a lot of people do, asmy parents probably did, as your
parents probably did.
Any number of, um, parentingstories, as different as they
are in their specifics,generally involve headlong
(05:56):
education in how not to let achild die.
and really Joel, the two yearold is the beating heart of the
story and the care, the need forhim to be looked after, to be
raised, to be steered, to beentertained, to be fed, to be
picked up, to be put backtogether again.
that's the, Thrust of the book.
Brett Benner (06:16):
And we've arrived.
Yeah, it's beautiful.
It's funny because yesterday,when I was writing down some
stuff from this, there was anarticle and now I'm sounding so
Hollywood.
There was an article on theHollywood reporter.
Talking about some of the stateof current television right now.
And it was talking about, threetelevision shows in particular,
shrinking, which is a show thatI actually work on.
(06:37):
And then this show, somebodysomewhere, that's on HBO.
And then the last one was, a maninside, which is a new Ted
Danson show on Netflix and thatset in a, retirement community.
But.
The article was talking aboutbridging the comedy with,
melancholy and sadness and thesuccess of that with all three
(06:57):
of these shows.
But it made me think of thisbecause one of the things that
the journalist said in the end,what works and what this is too,
is there is a collective empathywithout slipping into
sentimentality.
And that made a lot of sense.
With this to me, because itreally could have been maudlin
and also, kind of cloying andsweet with the sun.
(07:18):
And I feel like you really avoidall that in such a great way
that it is very moving, but it'salso so funny.
I mean, there's parts of it thatare like really, really, really
funny with these characters andalso Hugely identifiable, like
you just said, for anybody who'sbeen a parent
Tom Lamont (07:36):
Thank you for saying all that, Brett.
And, and I do, but I do want itto be, I always knew if I was
going to write about parentingsmall children, there was sort
of a few hurdles I knew I wasplacing in front of myself that
I'd have to get over.
One of them was, I absolutelywanted this to be a novel that,
you know, People could enjoywhatever their own engagement
with small children, withparenting or not.
(07:59):
And secondly, I just absolutelypoliced myself against as well
as I could police myself againstletting the two year old boy
become Chloe because, you know,kids are as in life in fiction,
a bit of a nightmare can be abit of a nightmare.
You know, there's, there's manya book I've sent sort of
spinning across the room becauseI just can't bear the child.
(08:19):
I don't believe them.
I've never met one like thesefictional kids.
And I really, really challengedmyself to try and get down.
Essentially my son, my son whenhe was two and the Extraordinary
and utterly ordinary ways thathe approached the world, the
sort of estranged middle statebetween being expressive and
(08:43):
baffling, between verbal andnonverbal, between independence
and total dependence.
It was a very particular momentin childhood I wanted to
capture.
Kind of a part of childhood Ithink none of us really remember
in ourselves, just slightlybefore memory, long term memory
kicks in, but which it's sobeguiling when you meet it, that
age, this is sort of that rogue,I guess in England we call them
(09:05):
toddlers, you know, because theytoddle, they go everywhere,
they're impossible to keep upwith, they have their first
taste of motion, of ofexploration, of naughtiness, and
they are at their mostexhausting, and at their most
magical, and so all of that Itried to bind up in Joel, but I
hope it is a story that anyonecan relate to, Read and get get
(09:25):
something out of because it'salso about the other end of
parenting the the saying goodbyeto one's own parents And sure
that is something that forbetter or worse almost everyone
will go through it has beenthrough it came out of a time in
my life as I was writing itwhere I felt very much sort of
arms distance from both, youknow, my, my little boy was
(09:47):
getting older.
My dad was dying and it was allhappening at the same time.
And at a certain point theyjust.
They were essentially the sametype of human, their needs were
the same, to care for them wasreally similar.
And I just wanted to put somefiction in that place, that
strange moment in a life whenyou can see almost both ends of
(10:09):
it, you're meeting, two peopleare almost meeting on a journey
in and out.
Brett Benner (10:12):
Yeah, my father.
Passed when my son was firstborn.
In fact, my parents were outvisiting in Los Angeles.
It's the first time that he hadseen him and he died that week
while he was here.
And, it's such a strange momentto All of a sudden, recognize
the journey.
(10:32):
as a parent, but you're alsostill a son.
And you're almost sandwichedbetween these two realities of
learning to or discovering howto parent yourself while also
watching your father, in thiscase for, for you, it's weird,
isn't it?
It's, it's very strange.
Tom Lamont (10:52):
It's a deeply weird phase, because also I think a
lot of people, me included,learn a new type of forgiveness
for your own parents.
When you become a parentyourself, you suddenly
understand it.
You understand so much moreabout the decisions they made,
the ways they frustrated you,the limits that were put on your
life, the rollercoaster of the,of the journey.
(11:13):
And I'm sorry, in your case.
That's heartbreaking as asituation to be in because you
were probably learning all thesethings about dadhood in, in this
case, the mix and the mess ofthat.
And you lost him incrediblyquickly, too quickly well, in my
case, it prompted newconversations with my father,
you know, just about, it mademe, you know, much more, much
(11:33):
more sympathetic.
And, it was like, you suddenlysaw the, the answers on the back
of the page, you know, yousuddenly, saw your own childhood
in greater depth in the round.
Brett Benner (11:45):
Absolutely.
And I think you have a, if notan understanding completely, at
least I don't want to saysympathy, but a kind of reality
of everybody's just human andthey were probably trying to do
the best that they were capableof doing in whatever
circumstances they were given atthis time.
You said that the character ofVic, some of it was inspired by
your father and, and thatsituation, and I've read,
(12:07):
another interview with you whereyou said, you know, your father
was not a meddler like Vic is,do you think if your dad read
it, he would have recognizedhimself?
Do you think he would have likedthe character of Vic?
Tom Lamont (12:18):
That's a really lovely question.
I, I have thought about itbecause I know the page I was
writing when he died.
I wrote it kind ofchronologically and I can sort
of see, I've got a book in frontof me now and I can sort of see
the moment in the book where hepassed away.
I write every day.
I wrote that morning of hisdeath, the day he died and I
wrote the day after.
We knew he was dying and I sortof knew that the time track I
(12:38):
was on, he was probably nevergoing to read it.
And That did allow a certainfreedom in writing a character
that drew certainly heavily onhis biography and his personal
experiences in life.
As I write in theAcknowledgements, I made some
pretty chunky changes to the, tothe, to the character of this
father figure, of, of Vic,because in order to make the
(12:58):
plot go, I needed I needed myfictional Vic to be a meddler,
as you quoted.
He needs to get involved a fewtimes, not always to the
advantage of everyone concerned.
So your question was, would herecognize himself and would he
like it?
I know that he would.
Brim with pride, just about thefact of the book and about the
fact of it being published.
(13:20):
I don't think he would recognizecertain parts of the
descriptions.
And I think he would be alarmedat other things, other
observations.
As you or I would when ourchildren grow up and write about
us.
But, but I think he would likethe character.
I think he would, as a lot ofreaders have fallen for Vic,
which I'm really pleased about,because he's, he makes a mess of
(13:42):
things a few times.
I think my dad, who wasn't aterrifically hungry reader, was
very empathetic and gave me avery solid grounding in trying
to think about things throughother people's eyes.
experiences, you know, just tryand walk in other people's
shoes, which is the root ofempathy, which is the root of
being a human, really.
(14:03):
And he was a great teacher ofthat.
And so I think he would vibewith Vic.
Yeah, I want to think so.
Luckily, I've never really hadto Find out though, you know,
these, I don't know how other, Idon't know how other authors go
through this.
I mean, you've, you've met them,you've interviewed them, you
know, when you capture people oraspects of people or slivers of
people and put them on the pageand they're still alive to read
(14:23):
it.
What must that be like?
How'd you, what's the nextSunday lunch?
Like, you know,
Brett Benner (14:27):
deny, deny, deny.
Tom Lamont (14:30):
Yeah.
Well, it's like, what's theZuckerberg line?
It's like, move quickly andbreak things.
Yeah, you fake it till you makeit.
Brett Benner (14:35):
I think I'd be more concerned If I was the
person that you modeled Ben offof, then I, I would be like, um,
uh, hello?
Tom Lamont (14:43):
Well, a lot, a lot of, a lot of readers of the book
have told me there were Ben's intheir own lives and
Brett Benner (14:48):
there's been in everybody's life.
That's the thing.
Tom Lamont (14:51):
And a lot of them are dated Ben's.
A lot of the women are datedBen's still, half burned, half
sort of, yearning for him.
Brett Benner (14:58):
Sure.
No, he's incredibly charming andjust incredibly self involved,
which is kind of what his appealis, you know, too.
Tom Lamont (15:05):
Well, I think we, we, I, I'm not like that at all.
And I think there is an appealfor passive people, for quiet
people, for introverts, to be,to have an extrovert, to have
the energy of someone a littlenarcissistic in their life,
because it's so propulsive, it'sso exciting.
You pay the consequences, butyou also just get to go along
(15:28):
for the ride a bit, you know,and I think I learned writing
this book that in a narrativethat involves multiple
characters in a, in a novel likethis one, you really want a few.
fuel sources, a few sources ofpropulsion of energy.
And I remember kind of lovingsettling into another Ben
chapter as I was, when I wasdeep underway on the writing of
(15:49):
this, because I would tinglewith a bit of that energy, you
know, the bit of the energy thatI don't otherwise possess a kind
of sure.
They care.
Hmm.
Brett Benner (15:57):
Are you more of a Teo?
Tom Lamont (15:58):
Teo, so yeah, so Teo's uh, quite, quite dutiful,
quite auxiliary, if we weregoing to enter the sort of
manosphere blog terminology, heis a baiter, and has recognized
this and resigned himself to it.
The world don't go aroundwithout baiters, you know, and
childcare, which is a huge partof this book.
It only happens with theresponsible, with the dutiful,
(16:18):
and you can't tell, you can'ttell the story of a, even a
moderately successful parentingjourney without one or more
dutiful people.
And so I wanted to try and teaseout through Teo's journey and
Teo's story, some of the drama,some of the glamour, some of the
grandeur in that, with a twoyear old kid.
(16:39):
You have to be there, in themiddle of the night, you know,
opening the band aid, you haveto be telling them the same
story, reassuring the samefears.
On a Tuesday morning, you arepushing those swings again and
again and again.
If that doesn't get done, thejob doesn't get done, you know?
And I I've always been quite,uh, feminine, I think in my
(17:03):
viewpoints.
I've always, I'm lucky.
I've had really strong women inmy life, great friends.
I've been with my wife for along time and.
I think there's lots of mistakesor things I did as a young
parent that I, you know,possibly wouldn't do again with
experience.
But I know that I came into itvery much like bolstered by not
being a kind of wild,uncontainable, extremely
(17:28):
masculine dad who just couldn'tbear the idea of domesticity.
There was a big part of me thatCould and would do that and see
the, try and enjoy the journeyof that and the granular
experience of that.
I mean, I, I would love to thinkthat one or two readers from
this, who were unsure abouttheir capabilities, unsure about
the limitations of parentingwould read this book and see
(17:50):
that it isn't, it's its ownworld.
It's the next adventure, youknow, it's a really amazing
thing to go through,
Brett Benner (17:57):
Oh my God.
It's.
It's the best.
And, and when you're in it,you're like, dear God, how will
I ever get through this?
And because there is no manualfor everything is so individual,
but it's literally like, hangon, here we go, because you
don't know what you're gettingin any facet of it.
And one of the things thatpeople will say it is it never
(18:19):
ends.
It never ends.
It gets better.
The dynamic changes and as theycontinue to become themselves,
that's truly magical.
And as they are as people, andyou begin to relate to them
differently, and hope thatwhatever you do next will not
send them into therapy for thenext 10 years,
Tom Lamont (18:37):
I'll be coming out on the couch.
I've come to think thatparenting The reason it's so
hard to put yourself into itbefore it happens, it's kind of
like illness or bereavement.
It's the totality of it.
You can't, it's very hard forthe human brain to imagine 24
hours, nonstop indefinitely.
You can imagine an hour ofstress.
(18:58):
You can imagine a day of pain.
It's very hard to, or pleasure.
You can, and it's very hard tojust see the, sort of infinity
of parenting or certainly whatfeels like infinity unfurling in
front of you.
And, no matter how much I triedin the buildup, it wasn't till
day one, minute one, that youstart, you start to understand.
Brett Benner (19:18):
So I'm just so curious, what was the Genesis
for you for the story?
Like where, where did this come
Tom Lamont (19:23):
I feel kind of like a geriatric debutante in a way,
being in my early forties, butthat's partly because I, I'm a
journalist in my daily life.
That's been my, been my career,been my shaped a lot of my
personality and It's been thebackground of my, of my adult
life.
But I have been trying to writenovels for a long time, and I've
(19:44):
written a couple to completionthat didn't quite work, weren't
really it, never found homes,never, were never bought, I say
all this to explain that Thisbook, Going Home, which is my
first published book, is verymuch the first novel I finished
that felt right, felt it worked,felt real, true, and partly that
(20:05):
was because the previous work Iwas trying to do was very much
drawn from kind of a off cut, anoverspill from journalism, I
would do a rich piece ofreporting, spend a lot of time
diving into a subject to write along piece of narrative
nonfiction, and I will be leftwith this kind of pool of excess
and interests and, um, questionsand fascinations.
(20:28):
You asked where this book camefrom, and it really came from
some frank conversations with,my agent, Jane Finnegan, and
with a couple of editors inLondon, including the editor who
finally bought this book, FedeAndonino.
Where they basically said, thebits in you that work as a
fiction writer are actuallyquite far from the journalist in
(20:48):
you and they're intimate,they're quiet, they're close,
they're domestic, they'reinterpersonal, they're about
people, small groups of people.
These are the bits that works,not the societal howls where
you're wearing your journalistichat and you want to point out
all the, the ills and it wasjust so clarifying for me to
hear that.
(21:08):
I mean, depressing initially,and sort of like as good a punch
in the stomach as I've ever had,probably.
And after the sort of ache wentaway, and I was able to sort of
figuratively stand up straightagain, I just got to work on
something totally different thatwas very close to home, was
absolutely drawn from livedexperience was set in the part
(21:33):
of London where I grew up.
it's about secular Judaism andlosing your faith.
Experiences I've had or beenadjacent to.
It's about, as we've discussed,a little boy who, you know,
I've, I've had one and it'sabout the way friendship kind of
evolves and sometimesdeteriorates from school onwards
as you as you yourself leavechildhood and enter adulthood
(21:55):
these bonds you've made can theycan be enriched for sure but
they can curdle as well andsometimes both these were all
things in the stew as i startedto write it i, I just, I went
away and wrote for 18 monthsevery day, didn't stop every
morning, didn't stop.
And where I was writing from wasjust totally different.
It was from, it was from theheart and the spine, you know,
it wasn't really so much thehead and, I could feel from, The
(22:18):
process of it, that it was, itwas right.
And, I just felt confident inwhat it was, I felt it was real.
It wasn't like, scraps.
It felt like it held together.
It's art, as a journalist,you're constantly leaning on the
rails of fact and place and timeand moving through time.
And a novel can be anything it'sephemeral and you make the
internal logic, you build theuniverse, however big or small
(22:40):
it is.
And, so it has to come from adifferent place, I think.
And so I guess I spent mythirties.
making mistakes that help meunderstand where it has to come
from.
And if it's had that effect onyou, as I'm delighted to hear
you say it has, that's becauseof that time.
I think that's because of that,that.
learning process that I'm gladto have gone through.
Brett Benner (22:58):
That's awesome.
One of the things you mentionedthat I wanted to ask you about
was The Judaic element in thebook.
You have these characters whoare all Jewish and it's not a
plot point necessarily oranything like that.
I mean, one of the characters,Sybil is a rabbi and she's such
a fantastic character that Iwanted to talk a little bit more
about in a second, but where didthat decision come for?
I know that your mother wasJewish and your father was
(23:20):
Scottish Catholic.
Tom Lamont (23:22):
Yeah.
I felt slightly like I hadn'treally read it before.
You know, my mom was raised in apretty liberal, pretty secular
Jewish family, a massive NorthLondon family, very close, very
loving, still are still enormousnumbers of us.
And my dad, Was, raised in care,in Scotland and at the time
(23:45):
being raised in care where hegrew up meant being raised by
nuns, you know, within theCatholic church that did it for
him in religion.
He was very circumspect about,what he would say, or the
memories he was willing to tapinto from this time.
It was an enormous and tragicstretch of time in his childhood
from a horrendously young age.
But I had as a journalist, I hadthe extremely strange experience
(24:07):
of happening upon a governmentreport about the care home he
was in that was, put togetherretrospectively by the Scottish
government.
So I did get to find out some ofwhat he'd been through and yeah,
I mean, at the very least of it,I understood why he was a lapsed
for sure.
But I think he, when he met mymom, he was pretty deep into his
life.
He was in his thirties and henever really had a biological
(24:28):
family and he'd had some piecesof, um, adopted families and
bits of experience, I know hewas magnetized to what my mom
had, which was dozens of people,a warmth, a spirit and energy
of, of a big, cacophonousfamily.
He kind of had this strange.
Non converting conversion.
He never took up the religion.
(24:49):
He never tried to apply for thatprocess you can go through to
convert.
He just sort of hung around it,and I think liked it, and took
what he took out of it.
And so my brother and I wereraised in quite a funny kind of
mutt like religious way where mymum's family went, were
initially more religious thanthey then subsequently were, so
(25:11):
they were on their own journey,kind of out of faith.
My dad was just, came collidingin from the side as a kind of
doubter and a skeptic and, butsomeone who loved the community
and they loved the warmth andthe ceremony and the occasion of
it.
And we were sort of raised inthis funny sort of in out space,
in a very, very culturallyJewish, certainly in our family
lives, but religion here andthere.
(25:33):
I was Bar Mitzvahed, which isfairly major religious rite of
passage to go through.
And at the same time, that wasmore or less the end of my sort
of academic religious engagementwith the synagogue I grew up in.
Sybil nominally the mostreligious as the community's
rabbi is on her own journeywith, with doubt, with loss of
(25:54):
faith.
And then Vic, I exaggerated andsome of my dad's own collision
into Judaism in that Vic lovesnothing more than to hang around
the synagogue.
He just likes to be a part ofit.
He's never, he's not, he's notof it.
He likes to be near it, thewarmth of it.
And that was Vic.
Pretty true to the spirit of myold man,
Brett Benner (26:14):
I've always felt like.
Judaism and the Jewish faith andJewish people, it does engender
such a sense of family andcommunity in a way that many
other religions don't, at least,certainly, I think, here in the
States.
And I've always been somewhatenvious of that there's just
such an incredible sense ofcommunity that's fostered and
it's so prevalent here.
(26:35):
I kept thinking of like thiswhole idea of it takes a village
in terms of raising a child, butalso just with that particular
community.
And, and that's why Sybil to meis such a great and wonderful
character because I love thatyou have this person who is
religious leader who you knowarguably we think they are going
(26:56):
to have all the answers and thisunwavering faith in whatever it
is but they're also human andthey're also faced with the fact
of having doubts about certainthings and Why things are
happening the way they are oryou know, whatever it is.
And she's so real and so human.
Tom Lamont (27:12):
Thank you.
Thank you.
She, she was the character I wasnervous isn't quite the right
word, but I was apprehensiveabout it because she's the only
woman I fully inhabit in thisbook.
I think that was a slightproblem of courage on my part,
and it's something I definitelyaddress in the future.
But it was partly a hesitancybecause I just didn't want to
(27:33):
get her wrong.
And I approached it partly bypulling from women I'm close to,
my wife included.
And partly there's just.
There's a lot of me at 40 in herbecause she's 10 years older
than the other characters.
I'm writing sort of As anauthor, I'm, I'm, I'm tapping
into my memory of what it waslike to be in my early thirties
(27:56):
to write the two main malecharacters in the book.
And with Sybil, she's ten yearson from then, and I get to be
sort of me now, almost sort of,checking in with the young, the
youngins.
And, just having that little bitmore sense of myself.
I mean, in her case, she'shaving these doubts.
She's going, it's the sametragedy that prompts the dilemma
(28:17):
of Joel's care that promptsSybil to question her faith.
And, although she is goingthrough something, That would be
traumatic to happen to areligious person, a person who's
chosen to be a religious leader,as they're calling.
To lose your faith, that's goingto be up there in the most
difficult things you can gothrough.
But I very much wanted her toConcurrent with that be know who
(28:44):
she is.
She's someone who knows who sheis, as I think I know who I am
in my forties in a way that Ihaven't done before necessarily.
So I'm so I'm delighted to hearyou responded to her like that.
Brett Benner (28:54):
It's also a real testament to kind of the staying
power of faith because havingsomething that would shake your
faith or make you really startto think and then to kind of dig
in and say, you know, as shedescribes it, or as you describe
in the book, She lost a means offluid conversation with God.
I loved that line.
So it's finding your way backand what is it that helps you
(29:16):
find your way back?
And I think so much of that thenbecomes rooted in her
interactions with Joel and Teoand with all of them in terms of
finding a sense of communityagain and finding a sense of
purpose and all of that, which Iloved.
I want to jump back to Joel andTao and going back to something
we were talking about in thebeginning, which is kind of the,
totality of, of raising a kidand something I, it just stuck
(29:37):
with me so much.
And, and I reread it last nightcause I just found it so moving
is this is such a simple thing,but it's the nighttime routine.
And, there's this great momentwhen Teo is laying next to Joel
in bed.
And he's talking to him and Joelis asking questions and
questions and Teo's trying toget him to go off.
(29:58):
And you captured this soincredibly well.
And later Teo is, is, Is talkingwith Ben and Ben says, you know,
I don't even know.
How do you know When they'vegone to sleep and he said you'll
know because the rhythm changesand I was like, that's it and
i've had those conversations andit was so right on and and I
remember sitting in a rockingchair in my son's room every
(30:21):
night and You know, he would betalking and you would just hear
him breathing.
And, and I kept thinking like,please just go down.
Please just go down.
Please just go down.
And one in one of two thingshappened.
I wanted him to fall asleepbefore I fell asleep in the
chair, because arguably then youwake up and your neck is stiff
and you're like, God damn it.
I've just, I've just wasted theentire evening because all you
(30:43):
want is to get them to a pointwhere you could get down and go
downstairs and maybe watchsomething on TV for a half hour
before you fall into sleep.
Yeah.
Right.
Okay.
And so I just love that.
It's so beautifully captured.
And the moment you think they'redone, I used to remember slowly
getting out of the chair andplease, and thinking to myself,
please don't creak, please don'tcreak, please don't creak.
And one fit hits the floor andall of a sudden he'd be like,
(31:04):
Papa.
Yeah, I'm here.
I'm here.
Tom Lamont (31:07):
I'm here, buddy.
I know.
It's.
It's like, um, you, um, and youcan't sound exasperated.
It's the one tone of voicethat's guaranteed to like, right
out of the depth.
Brett Benner (31:16):
Yes.
Tom Lamont (31:17):
I always thought of it as like, they're like, uh,
they need an S I think I putthis in the book, you know, they
need an escort to sleep.
They need, they need to bemarched to sleep as if you're
the police taking them to thestation and you're sort of
pushing their heads down to getthem into the back of a car.
And like, they just, they can'tbe, they can't be left alone in
those moments, but they kind ofwant to get there.
(31:37):
You definitely want to getthere.
And you, you get to know, youget to know every floorboard,
right?
You get to know, oh my God, it'sanother Creek of every chair,
but you also know, like, youtones and, you know, on their
part, there's the, there's thesnuffles and the rhythm of the
breathing on your part, youknow, that just the wrong kind
(31:57):
of voice can snap them back atback at, you're looking to
create this.
This strange, it's almost like atrick.
It's like a con.
It's like, it's like a long conyou're trying to play on them to
get them to just to let go ofthe rails of consciousness and
just go just drift off.
But the rewards are enormousbecause then you've got, oh,
you've got, you've got a fewhours, you know, you've got the
evening.
Brett Benner (32:16):
Yes, that's exactly right.
Um, well, Tom, I could literallysit here and talk to you all
day, but, I just want to thankyou again.
The book is fantastic.
It's a homecoming novel.
It's a family novel, both aboutfound family and given family,
and also a book about faith and,and, and childhood and
parenting.
So, um, please get it and polarbears.
(32:39):
Yes.
Yes.
Like, this is what I love somuch.
Cause people will look at thiscover and not understand it
exactly right away, but theresonance of this is, is
fantastic.
So congratulations.
For your success and for all ofthis, it's coming with it.
It's great.
And, and, um, and good luck withthat off.
Tom Lamont (32:54):
Thank you for having me, Brett.
This has been really fun.
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