June 6, 2026 • 48 mins
In this episode of Greek Mythology Retold, I sit down with New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Saint to discuss her newest novel, This Immortal Heart, a sweeping retelling of the legendary romance between Aphrodite and Ares. Known for her bestselling novels Ariadne, Elektra, Atalanta, and Hera, Jennifer shares what drew her to the goddess of love, the challenges of reimagining one of mythology's most misunderstood deities, and the enduring power of Greek myth in modern storytelling. Join us for a conversation about Aphrodite, divine love, ancient sources, the art of mythological retellings, and why these stories continue to captivate readers thousands of years after they were first told.
This Immortal Heart is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and wherever books are sold.
Explore more Greek myth and epic retellings:
The Homeric Chronicles, an adult fantasy series inspired by Greek mythology and the Trojan War.
Homeric Chronicles Series
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This Immortal Heart is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and wherever books are sold.
Explore more Greek myth and epic retellings:
The Homeric Chronicles, an adult fantasy series inspired by Greek mythology and the Trojan War.
Homeric Chronicles Series
WikiHow Expert Contributor
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:21):
Well, welcome back murmurd Ons to another episode of Greek
Mythology Retold Podcast. Today, I am delighted to be joined
by the best selling author Jennifer Saint. Jennifer studied classics
at King's College, London, inspired by a lifelong fascination with
the myths, heroes and heroines and the gods of ancient Greece.
(00:43):
She later spent thirteen years as an English teacher which
I really want to hear about that, and sharing her
passions for literature and storytelling with her students before turning
her attention to writing full time. She is the number
one internationally best selling author of Ariad, Electra at Atlanta
and Harah, novels that have introduced countless readers to the
(01:06):
women at the heart of Greek mythology through her vivid
and lyrical storytelling and fresh perspectives. Jennifer joins us today
to discuss her highly anticipated new novel, This Immortal Heart.
Look at how beautiful this is?
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Can you see that?
Speaker 1 (01:23):
That's gorgeous? And it's a story centered on Aphrodite, the
goddess of love and desire and beauty. And we're going
to be talking about Greek mythology the enduring appeal of
these ancient stories, maybe get into her writing process a
little bit and what readers can expect from her latest
journey into the world of the gods. Jennifer, Welcome to
(01:45):
Greek Mythology Retold, Well, thank.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
You so much for having me. It's such a pleasure
to see here.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
I'm very happy to have you. Do you remember the
moment that Greek mythology captured your imagination?
Speaker 2 (01:58):
So I think it's tea far back to really remember
the moment when it's very small. And my parents had
friends who lived in Cypress, so they took us there
in the summer and I was only a toddler. But
there's a photograph of me on the steps of an
amphitheater at a Greco Roman amphitheater, and at Korean and
holding a really gigantic ice cream. And I feel very
(02:22):
positive association made from an early age with the stories,
with the history, with the architecture, And you know, I
grew up just really fascinated by the idea that when
when you go to Cypress, all to Greece, you can
step into the places where these myths took place. There
is this there is this connection between the landscape between
the archaeology there is there are stories that are so
(02:44):
very rooted in a very very real sense of place
and time, and I find it just endlessly magical that
when you tell these stories, when you read these stories,
when you find new ways to reinterpret them, you are
joining this chain of connection that extends all the way
back through millennia to these people who lived very different lives,
(03:05):
who believed very different things, but he shared this at
their core, this interests, this enthusiasm, this reverence for the
same stories that we're enjoying now. I find the survival
of mythology just incredible.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
Is there a place that you specifically had a connection
to because you've been writing for a long time and
then you were teaching, so like, was there a place
that you want that you kind of got sparked?
Speaker 2 (03:30):
So I mean, I come back to Cypress again because
that's a really really special place for me, and it's
the birthplace of Aphrodite. So it's very relevant to this novel,
This Immortal Heart, which is the love story of Aphrodite
and ares in particular Aphrodite's rock in the Bay where
she is told to have emerged from the sea fully formed.
(03:51):
It's such an atmospheric place to visit, truly, and you
just you step down on it and I think, because
it's so wild, because it's so natural, because it's so unspoiled,
you feel that there is nothing standing between you and
the mythology. So I have I mean, I went back
to research this novel. I've taken my children to visit. Yeah.
I was writing my first novel, Ariadne when we went
(04:13):
out there, and to kind of reconnect with that sense
of this is why I love the stories. I can
stand here and I can feel these feelings. Was it
really pushed me on because you get to a point,
especially writing your first novel, and you don't know if
anything's ever going to happen with it. You get to
sort of kind of forty thousand words and you think,
is this a terrible mistake? And it's really helpful at
that point to remind yourself, oh, no, this is what
(04:35):
I love.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
Fantastic. Do your kids do they know you as like
a Greek mythology author or is it just like mom
on a Tuesday, regular stuff? Do they know your famous?
Speaker 2 (04:46):
They find it like incredibly normal. I really like the
idea that they can see having a creative career as
an achievable option, that it's just something that you can do.
I think it really kind of gives them a little
bit of inspiration that perhaps they can follow their own passions.
So I'm really grateful for that. But yeah, my youngest
was he was five years old when I got my
(05:07):
book deal, so he doesn't really remember anything different to that.
But yeah, they do know that when they come on holiday,
they will get dragged around a lot, and.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
It'll be interesting to see how that manifests in their life.
And when you look back at that picture, I'm sure
somehow a seed got planted. And then look where you
are now, So it'll be interesting to see where your
kids end up, you know, being archaeologists or something like that.
So what drew you to Aphrodite to be the central
(05:35):
figure of your of this Lady? Why choose Aphrodite?
Speaker 2 (05:39):
Well, yeah, I mean I asked myself the same question
because I had actually, honestly really written Aphrodite off as
a character as somebody who would ever be a protagonist
in any of my novels. I was doing an event
at Literature Festival a couple of years ago, and somebody
asked me, when if the audience questions was, did I
have any plans to write a romance, a Greek mythology romance,
(05:59):
And I said absolutely not, because there's no healthy romances
in Greek mythology. There's absolutely so you know, I couldn't.
But I think that something about that question must have
really lodged in my mind, because it was only a
few weeks after that that I was thinking about it,
and I thought, oh, but there is Aphrodite in herries.
And at first I thought, yeah, but I couldn't tell
(06:19):
aphredity story. She's not one of the goddesses. I'd kind
of made this shift to writing about goddesses because I
have three novels about mortal protagonists. I have the electron Atalanta,
and then I had written the novel of Hero. And
although here is this kind of intensely dislikable figure from
mythology in so many ways, you know, she kind of
commits all of these various acts of petty, cruelty and
(06:41):
spite and general unpleasantness, I could really easily find a
way into hear. I could really see the ways in
which she'd been misrepresented and the ways in which I
felt that the portrayal of her was unfair with Aphrodite.
I didn't have that immediate in I think that I
felt a little bit, probably put off by the fact
that Aphrodite, she's so shiny, and she's so perfect, and
(07:03):
she's so beautiful, and I thought, where am I going
to find the human core of Aphrodite to tell his story.
But it was the fact of this romance with Aris.
It's the fact of this really epic love story that
exists throughout mythology, in which although Aphrodite has numerous affairs
and she has numerous lovers, she keeps coming back to
Aries and he as the god of war. So you
(07:24):
would think a really hard sell as a romantic hearing.
You would think, you know, this is somebody whose business
is destruction and death and carnage. He is a surprisingly
inoffensive character male character of Greek mythology. Of all of
the gods, he is the only one who was never
involved in assaulting a woman. And in fact, although his
(07:44):
realm his domain is intimately associated with violence, the humans
committing violence against one another, we see him committing violence
against a human assaulter of his own daughter. We are
talking about a very patriarchal culture, and we are talking
gods who behave in various just atrocious ways across the board.
(08:05):
So I'm going to say that the bar is low,
but Ari's pleased with pease in terms of being Actually,
you kind of go, this is a relationship where I
can see there is something so compelling about it. And
this is a man, a god who has got something
about him that keeps the goddess of love. You can
have anybody she wants. He keeps her coming back to him,
(08:28):
And that was a story worth telling. And once I
started to look at Aphrodite through that lens, I just
found so many more things about her that made her
the perfect protagonist for me to take on.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
Yeah, I really enjoyed your take on her because you know,
my research in the work that I've done is primarily
in the Trojan War. I've seen her through a narrow lens.
I think I wasn't really focused in on what she
did outside of the Trojan War. So this was the
eye opening read for me that just gave me this
whole of perspective. She has her own mind, and I
(09:02):
liked how you humanized her but yet kept her as
a goddess that she could have these conflicting feelings about
Love herself, because I always see her as the one
that's interfering with Paris and Helen. I did not ever
see Aphrodite in the way that I did when I
read your book. I think people are going to like that,
and I don't want to say I'm trying not to
(09:23):
say any spoilers. If anybody was to just like google
the the love triangle there, maybe you want to talk
a little bit about that, because that was that was
full of good stuff.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Yeah, I mean, there's always kind of a bit of
a caffette when it comes to Spiolist and that you know,
some of the offense of the enophl have been public
knowledge for a couple of thousand years. So if you
know about critology, you probably know about aris Aphrodite and Hephiastis.
There's love triangle. I so wanted to take on that
part of the story because that's that's the way in
(09:56):
which I can see Aphrodite as a really subversive god,
because I think that when you see her, like you said,
through the lens of the Trojan War, we're seeing her
through this very narrow and very misogynistic kind of male
gaze kind of way where we're kind of where we're
going here is this war that men are waging upon
each other, which women can we blame for it. Let's
(10:16):
blame and let's blame Helen and say that it's all
their fault, and then all the men can escape all
the culpability for everything. And of course it's used who
are initially wants the Trojan war to happen anyway, So
it always comes to blame on a woman. But when
you have this love triangle, this Aris and Infestus, who
are two brothers, they are both the sons of Zeus
and Hera and Aphrodite, who miraculously is not related to
(10:38):
either one of them. Because again, when it comes to
the gods, there's a whole lot of everybody being related
to one another that can be quite upsetting. It was
quite upsetting when I was telling the story of Hero
because he's his sister. But Aphrodite, she's different. She's born
from the castration of the sky, She's born from the
unmanning of urin Us, and that in itself presents her
(11:00):
this instead of seeing her through the male gaze, and
that's the way that we see her represented in art.
That's why we see her represented in sculpture that we
see her increasingly unclothed, and we kind of see these
statues of her where she's like dropping and her dress
and looking at us really kind of coquettishly over her shoulder.
And all of these ways that we see Aphrodite are
(11:20):
very much shaped by male desires. And you could say, well,
here's this goddess of love and sex who exists in
order to please men, and she absolutely doesn't, and she
absolutely doesn't throughout all of the stories. And I think
you can see that in the fact that she's born
from the ultimate male nightmare of being castrated, that gives
rise to so already, like we can see that she's
(11:42):
challenging and she's destabilizing, but also she's one of the
goddesses who stays unmarried. And I think it's so interesting
that the goddesses of Olympus do stay unmarried. It really
kind of shows you this is kind of how women
take their power, that they are not going to if
they get married, that they are going to give their
power to their husbands. And so the goddess is Olympus,
(12:03):
apart from Hero, managed to find ways to not be married.
But Aphrodite, unlike Athena, and like Hestia, unlike Artemis, she
doesn't take any She is not a virgin goddess. She
is still able to she have as many lovers, as
many male lovers as she wants to be their gods,
be the immortals. She can go ahead and do that
(12:23):
with impunity. She is a woman who makes her own choices,
and again is living more frightening to the patriarchy than
a woman with agency and a woman with autonomy. And
so at one point she is forced into a marriage.
She is forced to marry Hephestus. There is this context,
and he ends up being the winner of it. But
even then she continues to exercise her own choices. She
(12:47):
never has children with Hephestus, so you could kind of
interpret from that that she doesn't treat this as a
real marriage, that she is not going to actually be
Hephaestus's wife. There is, and this is a scene that
didn't actually make it through rounds of editing, but I
did write it. There is a scene in which she
and Aires are caught in a net, actually in the
(13:07):
act of adultery, and all of the God's witness and
the fact that she's not willing to stay faithful. She
is not willing to be tamed. So the love triangle,
it's so much an assertion of Aphrodite's independence and Aphrodite's
ability to choose. I didn't want to make ca Fastus
a villain, but I wanted to explore just the dynamics
(13:30):
of choice and agency within that situation. And there are
so many stories throughout mythology of women who have the
ability to choose taken away from them that I find
it just really refreshing to read Aphrodite's story and find
a woman who never loses the ability to choose.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
That's one of the things that I liked about that,
which was living with her. Vice just wasn't like being
in a cage. She was like living separate together but separate. Yeah,
and you made her fight. He was reflective of the choice,
and he understood his complicity and what happened between the
contest that where he wins and the scene where she
(14:10):
I don't want to I don't want to spoil it
and she but she does have to tell aries. And
that scene was I thought it was kind of heartbreaking
because you could she didn't want to do it, but
she was. She knew she had to you know, it
was the lesser of kind of two evils in a way.
It was it was better to keep the peace in
Olympus than to break her promise, you know, and and
(14:31):
run away because Aries like, just let's run away, we can.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
Yeah, I think I just I wanted Aphrodity to prioritize
ultimately who she is over everything else she she like
I said, she and Aries tease each other, but more
than that, Aphrodite es is herself, and she chooses the
rele that she plays. And I really never wanted to
trivialize what being the goddess of love might mean, because
it's actually such a fundamental, integral part of the human
(14:58):
experience is to love. And if you don't have the
goddess of love, if you don't have love in your life,
whatever kind of shape or one that might take, then
what is the point of everything else that the other
gods are doing? What are you living for? If it's
not to have something that enriches your life and makes
it worth living.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
What do you think is the biggest misconception then? For Aphrodite,
did that influence how you took the perspective that you did.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Yeah, I think it would be that she is insipid,
that by being the goddess of love and by being beautiful,
that that makes her vapid, and that makes her realm
kind of a superficial one. That was really what I
was pushing back against in my depiction of Aphrodite, that
what she does is so important and that she knows
(15:45):
its importance. I was quite interested as soon as I
started writing, and I'd had in my head that Aphrodite
was going to do a lot more of the meddling
in people's affairs than she actually ends up doing throughout
the novel. And that's because I immediately came up against
an issue that really didn't trouble the ancient writers of
the myths at all, and that's the issue of consent. Okay,
(16:07):
Aphrodite is this goddess who is always making her own choices.
So I don't think that she is someone who is
then going to override other women's choices. And so I
had to really make a distinction between you know, when
Zeus is on the prowl, when Zeus is looking for
women and for nymphs and for goddesses, he is not
using Aphrodite's power. He's not doing this with the assistance
(16:28):
of Aphrodite, because what he's doing is not about consent,
and it's not about Yeah, I felt that the bar
of Rapiditi would always be enthusiastic consent. That's not something
that troubles use ever, It's not something that occurs to him.
So I really wanted to draw that distinction between power
and between desire and the ways in which Aphrodite wields
her power. That was something that I just ended up
(16:50):
grappling with a lot through the novel and figuring it out.
And I do include the myth of Pygmalion and Galateaea,
and Pygmalia is really, you know, the original in cell
He is this man who despises women, who takes to
the streets and rails against how awful women are and
like how stupid they are and how vain and how
they repulse him. And so he carves his own woman
(17:12):
out of stone and has a you know, incredibly creepy
relationship with his own sculpture. And Aphrodite is apparently so
charmed by this that she brings the sculpture to life.
I was really wanted to delve into that idea of okay,
she to create this fully formed woman with no experience,
no knowledge, no understanding, no ability to do the things
(17:33):
that Aphrodite has done in terms of ever being able
to say no, and for Aphrodite to actually have to
engage with the consequences of that. So I wanted to
take myths like that and give them a spin and
turn them on their head and actually think is the
outcome here, and you know, how will Aphrodite deal with
the fallout?
Speaker 1 (17:51):
That is a really touchy issue with the Greek mythology,
the issue of consent, the myth with Zeus going after leader.
The artwork that always shows it as sensual and romantic,
that wasn't the experience at all. And I hold in
my mind this idea of this giant swan assaulting a woman,
how terrifying that would be. That's not romantic at all.
(18:13):
But it gets put into some sort of sexualized encounter
that was wonderful for Leeda no way man, very similar
to pacifying the bull, which is, you know, a Poseidon's
curse that he inflicts on her.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
I just these things. Actually you don't have to dig
very deep to say, oh no, this is an atrocity.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
Yeah, absolutely, So what do you hope that readers are
going to understand about Aphrodite by the end of the book.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
I think that what was really fundamental to me for
Aphrodity was that she is a goddess of all kinds
of love, and I really wanted to make that clear
throughout the novel. That she is somebody who is going
to champion everybody's right and ability to love the way
that they want to, and that in doing that, she
is creating a better world, and that there are all
(19:01):
of these forces arrayed against her, destructive forces and even
what Aris stands for war is never going to make
the world a better place, and that's something the two
of them have to reconcile. But what Aphrodite wants to
do is to create a different kind of a world,
and I just I want there to be that kind
of hope that that is something possible and that that
(19:22):
is something realistic.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
And that's such a good message for today's world in general.
We need, we need more kinds of love and empathy, understanding, reflection,
all that. That's great. So Aris, let's talk a little
bit about Aris. I found your ares incredibly like mister
Darcy of Olympia, even though he was a god of war.
(19:46):
I liked his interaction with Aphrodite, but and he was
sort of you know, he's kind of aloof, but you
get the sense of how drawn he is to Aphrodite,
and I think maybe a little bit it kind of
intimidated by her a little bit.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
Talk to us about your eeries. Yes, of course I
loved writing Aris. I really really loved it. Is my
favorite male character that I've ever written. I mean, I
think that mister Darcy plays heavily into her. He's always yeah,
just kind of you know, leaving parties in a really
bad mood. But I when it came to Aries, because
(20:27):
there was so much freedom actually to create this character,
because he doesn't figure in the mythst and the way
that the other gods do. He is this separate figure.
He is this outcast and that nobody wants to really acknowledge,
and nobody really wants to worship him. The sort of
sense that I got was that, Okay, well we need
to have a god of war, because like, war exists,
(20:47):
and we've got to have somebody in charge of it.
But nobody else wants to get their hands dirty. Nobody
really wants Aries around because they find what he does
so distasteful, and yet all of them are benefiting from
it all the time. You know, the gods, of course
benefit from chaos and from violence and from conflict. It
brings them more worship, it brings them more sacrifices, it
(21:08):
brings them more power. So everybody kind of wants to
reap the rewards, but nobody who wants to be ares.
And so he is this, he just exists on the
fringes of Olympus, and it makes him this outcast figure.
But I felt that he would and because he is
who he is, and he you know, he is prone
to his rages and his temper famously, and then his
(21:31):
repactance is just to intrench himself more deeply into like, well,
I don't want anything to do with all of you anyway.
And there's his mister Darcy element. He just has no
time for the rest of them. But when he sees Aphrodite,
he can see that in many ways she is like him,
because love and war they are very different things. That
they are, those very primal elements of the human condition,
(21:54):
those this kind of urge for violence and this urge
for desire. They are both instinctive, and they are both
incredibly powerful. And they are both incredibly intoxicating, and both
of them exists on the fringes of Olympus to some degree.
While Aphrodite has got charm and she's got persuasion, and
she can make everybody love her, so she can move
among the other gods very expertly and very definitely, and
(22:17):
she's still not quite like them, you know, Like I said,
she has this different origin story, she has this different
birth that makes her not like the others. And what
she does is not feared and reviled the way that
what Aris does is, but it's definitely treated with a
lesser degree of seriousness than what the other gods are doing.
(22:37):
And so the two of them do stand apart. They
do have more in common than you would think from
the outside. And I found with Ares that he was
somebody because he exists on the fringes, because he is
never invited in or never welcomed in, he becomes this
really good observer of other people's behavior, and he has
(22:58):
this great understanding and you know, an emotional intelligence that
means that he is very aware of the pretenses people
put up, and the lies that they tell about themselves
and the lies that they believe about each other, and
he can He's got this ability to see through all
of that, and that makes him recognize Aphrodite as something different.
I was also really conscious of the fact that Aphrodite,
(23:21):
this sort of history of how the goddess and her
worship came to be, It does originate with goddesses who
precede her, who were goddesses of love and war. At
the same time, you have these really feracious goddesses who
exist before Aphrodite, who did both. I kind of liked
the idea that if she had sort of the worship
of Aphrodite had had been influenced by the worship of
(23:45):
goddesses like an Anna goddess is like Astarite when she
loses the warmungering part of her self and emerges just
as a goddess of love. Maybe Arees is that missing
part that she lost, and so the two of them
can kind of recognize that within one another that you know,
the romantic in me would say they make each other complete.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
Which ancient sources did you rely on for Aphrodite or
for Aris? And you know, I was just thinking, I'm
jumping head to I think you're the audiences. They think
of aries mostly through the Trojan War, Lens. So I
always envisioned the ares that you're that you were talking
about how everybody sees the glorifying war covered in blood,
(24:24):
reveling in the battle, and so reading him in your
book as the mister Darcy I saw him as the
mister Darcy figure. I had never actually thought of Aris
being in love and having having this whole interior life,
you know what I mean, outside of the Trojan War,
because most people I think relate to Aries through the
(24:46):
Trojan War.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
I just hadn't thought about any of that, not all, No,
I mean, yeah, I think when it when it came
to the Iliad that there was not much from that
I wanted to take for Aries. There was the battle
cry that it's in kind of physical descriptions of Aries
that that I wanted to take from the Iliad. And
there's the fact that he and Aphrodite are you know,
(25:07):
are so together in the Iliad and they're fighting on
the same side, and they are concerned for one another.
So those elements came in. But more than kind of
anything written for Arees, I would say that I came
back to there is a vase painting of Aries and
its Aries after Aphrodite is going to be married to Hephaistus,
and it's it's called something like Aries looking forlorn. He's
(25:31):
just kind of sitting like slumped, kind of looking down
at the ground and like really really miserable. So it
was that kind of rather than any particular stories about Aries.
It was this really emotional portrayal of Aris that I
looked at and I was like, there is his inner life.
There is there is Aries with this broken heart, with
(25:53):
these wounded feelings, and there was Yeah, that that really
inspired me for him, because yeah, when I'm looking at
the ancient sources, I like I'm looking at art and
I'm looking at the written sources as well. There's obviously
kind of a wealth of material about Aphrodite, like far
more for her than for Ares. There's two of them
are in the Iliad, the story of the net the
adultery that comes up in the Odyssey. The Metamorphoses has
(26:17):
so many stories particularly about Aphrodite. So I was using
that and Hesiod's Theogony that's where I took the Birth
of Aphrodite from. So yeah, so I always kind of
I'm always a magpie going from source to source and
plucking out the bits that I like. I found a
huge inspiration this time in Anne Carson's translation of Sapho's
(26:37):
poetry If Not Winter, because these are poems written by
Sappho in the sixth century. It's her love for another woman,
but she's she calls upon Aphrodite so much within the poems,
So there are some really powerful descriptions of Aphrodite, and
there are just some beautiful, beautiful descriptions of yearning and
(26:58):
passion and desire really ready shaped the emotional color of
the novel for me.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
And you really captured that yearning element. I thought when
you follow on book talk or in Instagram, in the
book world, it seems like readers are wanting more yearning
in their novels, and I think they're gonna find that
in this book. Maybe that's why I just felt like
there was a connection between your Aris and mister Darcy,
because there is that element of he's a little he's
(27:26):
dark and brooding, but also in love. And to have
to watch the woman or goddess that he loves knowing
that she has to marry somebody else, I don't know
what else would be so heartbreaking. She has to pull
out from inside of her soul that I'm going to
go through with this marriage that I don't want to do,
but it's for the betterment of my world and for
(27:49):
the peace of other people. It's the right thing to do.
I can't be an oath breaker. And she's true to herself,
but at the same time, you know she's heartbroken, but
she has to push it down and try to distract
herself by living this new other life. And as just
just has to watch it happen and he has to
(28:10):
know about it. That's awful.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Well of all the blazes to your pride, which it's
it's pretty terrible.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
Yeah, I'm curious why did you cut You said you
cut the scene out with the net Yeah, made What
was that decision? Why did you do that?
Speaker 2 (28:25):
So there are always so many scenes that don't make it.
And I because when I'm writing a first draft, I
really love to throw in as much mythology as I
possibly can, and the editing process is quite often just
stripping out the myths that are extraneous, that don't fit,
that don't support the story, or that in this case,
just don't match the tone. The story of aarries nephrodite Internet,
(28:47):
it's really iconic but it's very much it's like a
French face. It's it's kind of absurd and comical. So
as much as I loved writing it, and I really
enjoyed the scene, it was, it kind of tipped it
too far into I just I think that ultimately readers
would have found it so distracting that I think it
(29:10):
would have undermined the emotional resonance.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
So in the end, did it hurt your feelings to
have to cut it?
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Actually I offered it up, I kind of. I'd written
my first draft and I sent it to them, and
I had a list of suggested cuts because there's also
areas and Aphidity have a daughter, and their daughter is
called Harmonia's She's the goddess of I mean, isn't that beautiful,
the goddess of love and war? Make this daughter who
brings harmony and peace? She was in there, she went.
I just lifted her out completely. She didn't belong in
(29:39):
the story of this romance. This was really about how
they come together and how they choose one another. So
kind of bringing in a daughter complicated that as well,
and so I had a list of kind of I
think these strands of the story are going to have
to go as much as it will break my heart
to get rid of them, and because that's what's going
to save this not and you know it's always the
(30:01):
future to tell those stories in a different way.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Well, maybe you can release like a special edition with
deleted scenes. You know how they do that for films.
You will do the director's cut with deleted scenes. You
can give us those. I always want to hear when
authors cut this out or I cut that out, I'm like, oh, man,
we said.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
She did the scenes version. Definitely, Yeah, oh that would
be that would be awesome.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
When I think about that scene and I think about
them being caught in the net, that would be so embarrassing.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
But I like to think for Aphrodity never lets herself
be embarrassed. And I will say, like in the version
of the scene, she puts all the shame back on
Hephaestus and she's like, he created the net. This is fault.
That was like already, dare she try Cathestus? And I'm yeah,
not apologized for it.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
Because it was I mean, he was doing it for
the purpose of humiliating her, yeahd aries, but her being
the woman, she was going to take the blame. I
think yeah, that's what he wanted. I don't know if
it was zaphrod iity of I just did that to me.
I don't know if I would even like him as
a person anymore.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Yeah, well this is because I had Hiphastus as a
major character and hero as well, and in that, you know,
he really is like you really you really feel sorry
for him because he is the child of these parents
who are so awful to each other to him, who've
gotten like, never seem to care for him. In citest
(31:21):
either way that he and Aris turn out, I think
they're very much the products of abusive, horrible parents in
a terrible, controlling, poet of relationship. And you see that
the kind of one turns to this sort of violence
and rejection of everything, and the other one is this appeaser,
kind of always trying to make things beautiful and trying
to make things work out. So I had this huge
amount of sympathy for Hephaestus already, and when I came
(31:44):
to write this story, I thought, you know, he's involved,
like in mythology, in these really unsavory stories as well,
and I'm going to really bring that side of him out.
But when I get him on the page. I just
really like him, I just really do. I find it
really hard to him as a villainous character. I feel
so much sympathy with him, and I think every time
(32:04):
I read the earlyad and the way that he is
treated and the way that he is mocked and laughed
at for his disability, you just cannot feel admiration. I
think for who Hephaestus is that he just keeps making things,
and he is always teaching, and he is always he
like he works. He has a craft and he works
at it, and so yeah, I always think I'm going
(32:28):
to bring in like that horrible story where he tries
to assault Athena and all of these things, and then
actually the Hephaestus who turns up on my pages is
not that god at all. He's somebody much much more
complex and layered.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
Does resonate with the herphasis that makes the armor for
Achilles behast Thetis because he's very kind in his relationship
with thedis.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
The depiction of all of human life, from like the
very very small to the grand. I think, like a
god who can pare that much attention to how humans
live and exist. That feels really fundamental to his character
to me, he has.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
Golden automatons that are women, you know, maids. That's that
seem to be somewhat sentient. Have you ever thought about that,
because when I read that, I'm like, that's crazy.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
Yeah, those are automatons that they're in here. Actually I
do include them, and I include them in like a
really creepy scene kind of when all the gods have
abandoned Olympus and you have these like these very sinister
figures just rolling through silently. They're incredibly sinister. I mean,
but I think I always just took it as well.
He's very technologically forward thinking and he's on the cutting
(33:41):
edge all the time. So yeah, I just I've always
taken it as just an indication of what an incredibly skilled, kind,
preternaturally skilled craftsman he is, and how incredible his accomplishments are.
That's that's the way that I've read it. But like
I said, I'm very sympathetic towards he Festus.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
Naturally, if Hollywood were too call you tomorrow and make
your book a movie, who would you cast as Aphrodite? Series?
Speaker 2 (34:06):
And her feistis I'm absolutely terrible answering this question because
I know I can never remember who any actors even are.
And I can tell you that Aphrodite, I would not
cast her, But I did have real life inspiration for Aphrodite,
and my real life inspiration for how to create this
character was I can tell you, Taylor Swift. That was
because I was thinking. It was when I was thinking,
(34:29):
how am I going to make this beautiful, powerful goddess
relatable to my reader? Not before I even get to
my reader. How am I going to make her somebody
that I can unlock and understand because she feels untouchable
and she feels very removed. And I really came back
to Taylor Swift. I really came back to the way
that you have somebody who is I guess in the
(34:50):
context of the twenty fifth century, a goddess wields incredible wealth,
it's incredible power in social status, has a huge amount
of worshipers. I was at the Aristo Wembley and I
think there were ninety two thousand people in the crowd
that night, you know, And when you are in a
part of something like that, it is I mean, it
is a cult. And I am the Swifties, I'm in
the cult, you know. And I felt like, how is
(35:12):
everybody here feeling as though this billionaire, this like beautiful,
kind of very very distant person is so close to
us and kind of that we understand her and that
she understands us. How is she creating that feeling? And
it's because the way that she writes, the stories that
she tells through her songs, and again, because she writes
so much about love, and Aphrodite is somebody who falls
(35:33):
in love so many times. And I never wanted it
to be cynical, and I never wanted it to feel shallow,
and I don't think you feel that when you are
embracing Taylor's discography, you are hearing somebody who throws themselves
into relationships, into everything she does wholeheartedly with optimism and
idealism and sometimes naivety, but really like all of herself.
(35:55):
And that makes her vulnerable, and that creates an intimacy
between her and her listeners. And that's what I wanted
for Aphrodite, that there would be that fragility, that there'd
be that vulnerability, and that there would be that sense
of intimacy. I think that you just you have a
really difficult cell when you are thinking, who can portray
a goddess who's got to be so very beautiful and
(36:17):
so very perfect, and we've we've got to find the cracks,
and we've got to find the flaws, and we've got
to find the ways in. I don't know if Tailor
can act. I don't know. I haven't seen the movies
that she's been in, and so I'm I'm not saying
that I'm going to cast her, but she she kind
of was as far as I was concerned, the human
version of Aphrodite that I could draw on to just
just to figure out my way into it. When it
came to Aries, I had had a very specific visual inspiration,
(36:41):
and that is from the TV shows Zena and Hercules,
who's an easial inductor. He really tragically died. I think
he was only about thirty eight when he died. And
he's called Kevin Smith. He is so handsome, he is
just so dreamy. I would advise everybody to immediately google
image Kevin Smith Aries. That was my my whole research
(37:02):
was just looking at like photos of him in leather,
and again, like, we can't cast him because, like I said,
he's very tragicised on, but you know, he's my dream casting.
I want it to be him. Yeah, and yeah, and
I didn't. I didn't really have a kind of visual,
real life anchor for Hephaestus. I don't think so nobody
(37:23):
comes to mind for me because I'm not particularly a
visual person. When I'm writing, I don't. I kind of
see my characters in a much more sort of soft
focus way, you know, I'm not. I never really think
specifically about their features that they're kind of They're always
a little bit blurred for me. It's really who they
are inside. So I always find it difficult would who
(37:45):
would actually be the right person to play them on screen?
Somebody from Hollywood needs to call me and like we'll
talk about they do.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
They absolutely do. Everybody is focused on Hades and Persephony,
and I think that if any listeners and readers like
Persephone and Hades, they'll like your Ares and Aphrodite.
Speaker 2 (38:03):
But no, I was going to say, it's the contrast
of darkness and light. But Aphrodite is starting from the
position of somebody much more knowledgeable, experienced, and more in
control than Pansophony. So I feel that in terms of
a healthy romance and something kind of that really has
got that feminist funt to it. She works a little
bit better for that.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
You've written, You've written Ariadne, Electra, Atlanta, Hera, and Aphrodite.
Which of these female characters have dayed with you the
longest after finishing.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
The book, So they all really really have, They're all
really like will live in my heart forever, definitely. I
think Heirah Herah made this really powerful impression on me,
just because I felt so much that I was wrong
about her before I started to tell her story. I
really felt I was one of the people who judged
terror unfairly, I think, and so much of the negative
(39:00):
perception of hero is bound up in misogyny and is
bound up in a kind of agism. I think this
is kind of the way that you know, hair can
be like eternally young and beautiful, I all the goddesses are,
But because she is a wife, she occupies this matronly
space and she's true I never really thought about that before,
and so as a wife, she really embodies these really depressing,
(39:22):
misogynistic stereotypes. And I just when I came to actually
tell her story and to open her up and to
be things from her perspective, which is often a warped perspective,
by Killlectra. She is not somebody who I am always
wholeheartedly championing in everything that she does. But I just
(39:46):
found so much complexity to her, and I thought, because
she's married, is use and she is the queen of
the goddesses. In that respect, she is powerful. And the
way that we talk about hero I think really reflects
the way that we talk about powerful women and the
way that we talk about women when they cease to
be young and beautiful and pliable, in the way that
(40:07):
we think that women should be forever, and that I
think in telling here a story, it did really make
me think about the way that we that we view
women and I found it sobering.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
What grades or levels were you teaching?
Speaker 2 (40:22):
So I was teaching the years old eighteen years old?
Say that's high school in the UK.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
Did you get to teach any of the myths to
your kids or would do you have required ones? Or
I want to hear about that. I want to hear
about your classroom.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
No, the impression that Greek mythology occupies more of a
space on the American curriculum than it does in the UK.
It's not it's not required. You wouldn't have to cover it,
but I always did. I always loved teaching in Greek
mythology because it was it was also it was it
was the way in with kids, and they just loved it.
We would always find that teaching Greek mythology would engage
(40:57):
students kind of across the spectrum. Boys, girls are like,
they were just into it, they really really loved it.
And then once they have that grounding, once you have
that kind of cultural knowledge of Greek mythology, then you
find it everywhere else. So as we go on to
teach the rest of the curriculum. Mean, when we're teaching Shakespeare,
you can say, here is a reference. You know this reference.
(41:19):
You know, like he's mentioning Hikarti in Macbeth for example,
you know who she is, Like we've covered her, and
kids could see then that the way that stories never
exist in isolation, the way that the whole kind of
body of literature is this like twisting branching creation where
everything feeds back on itself and everything calls to Everything
(41:41):
is intertextual, Everything is entwined all the time, which I
just think is so extremely grounding and helps students to
understand kind of where things fit and how perceptions are shaped.
I think when your goal is always to teach students
to ask questions and to think critically, and I think
mythology is a really good space to do that, because
(42:02):
there are differversions of all the stories, because there are
pieces missing, because there are fragments that come to us
and there are gaps. You can ask students kind of
what they think, like if you turn it around, if
you look at things from Ariadne's perspective, if you look
at things from Hero's perspective, what different story do you uncover?
You know, you have this like really kind of shifting
cast of characters that you can keep poking holes in
(42:25):
and you can see how they've been used over and
over again through literature. What different things have they been
called on to represent? And what might that tell us
not just about the stories, but about the different storytellers.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Was it hard for you to leave teaching to write
full time?
Speaker 2 (42:40):
So? Not when I actually did it, because I had
actually when I came to write Ariadne, I had moved
to a different school. I'd kind of been teaching at
the same school for a long long time. I moved
to a different school and it had a very different
ethos is are a much more kind of corporate environment,
and it was one where actually that freedom to be
(43:00):
creative with lesson planning with what we were teaching it
didn't really exist. So I had been being able to
choose the text that I was going to teach my
students and to choose how I was going to teach
them to adapt it to the class in front of me,
and that was just really not the case. And this
is like very much a kind of you will kind
of do this set formula and you will teach the
text that we do across the whole. And there were
(43:21):
like twenty two schools all in this same trust. And
so I found that when I moved to that environment,
I really had no creative outlet anymore. And creativity has
always been such an important part of my life that
without it very quickly started to burn out. And it
was writing Ariadne that kept me going that once I
had completed it, and once I'd found an agent and
(43:44):
sold it to a publisher, I found it easy to
walk away from teaching in the moment. There's sort of
seven years that have passed since I have missed it
a lot, but it's not an environment I would go
back to in the same way.
Speaker 1 (44:00):
I can see that in America we have so I
teach history and English. So in the English department specifically,
there are set texts that you have to use. And
thank god, the Odyssey is part of the freshman curriculum,
and they do chunks of the story, you know, it's
not the whole Odyssey. Yeah, but it's very much regimented,
just like you said, and they don't encourage so much creativity.
(44:24):
You know, you bring in your own sources to the table.
I always try to sneak stuff in and do what
your you do, what you have to do, what they
call them like your priority pieces, but then trying to
like bolster that with like other other things to do
that creative outlet, which is one of the reasons why
I do a podcast. Find it somewhere, Yeah, exactly. So
(44:44):
what's next for Jennifer Saint? What do you what do
you think you might want to be working on?
Speaker 2 (44:49):
So I am raising my six novel at the moment,
and there's not much I can say about it at
the moment because it's in the very early stages. So
in the past couple of months and I got a
puppy and He has completely turned my life upside down
and it's really interfered with the early stages of this novel,
I've got to say. So I've been writing around him,
(45:11):
and so it is another goddess, but it is a
dual narrative with a model woman as well, so there
a few of them and they've kind of against one another.
It's just been really, really fun that I have just
I've so enjoyed writing it, and I think because my
time has been a bit more and a bit more limited,
I've just been so excited to get back to it
every time I can, and so I'm really looking forward
(45:32):
to being able to say more about it. But until
it takes a little bit more shape, I'm not There's
not much I can say that's exciting.
Speaker 1 (45:39):
Do you have any speaking engagements that are lined up
for over the summer in the UK or to the
United States?
Speaker 2 (45:46):
Maybe, well, I would love to come over to the States.
Know it's not on the cards at the moment. Yeah,
I had today as we're talking. The book is published
in the UK on Thursdays, and yeah, I'm going to
go on tour. I'm up in Scotland next week and
then I'm just kind of traveling through the country and yeah,
(46:06):
going to lots of bookshops and literature festivals, and it's
really exciting. It's just a really really it's a part
of the job that I never even imagine because I
want to be an author. I'm just going to kind
of sit alone in a room and write. It opens
you up to this whole whole world of meeting readers,
meeting booksellers, meeting other authors, and it's so much fun.
(46:26):
So I'm very nervous and I'm very excited to get that.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
I'm envious of everybody that gets to go sit and
meet you in person and listen to you talk about
your book. I'm way over here, but at least my
audience and hopefully your audience will find this and get
a chance to see you and hear you. If they
can't make engagement, I so appreciate meeting you and getting
a chance to talk about Let me put this book
(46:51):
up here a long time, Like, how gorgeous that is?
This immortal heart that is the color scheme is fantastic,
This is gorgeous.
Speaker 2 (46:59):
It is that I think is my most beautiful looking
book so fast I love it. I like to wear
lots of things that match my book covers. When I'm
on top and I'm a blonde, I'm really well, so
I'm just I'm really happy they went with that. It
was trickier with Atalanta because that was orange. In the UK,
I found it harder, hard to pull. It's great.
Speaker 1 (47:17):
So the book comes out July or excuse me, June ninth.
Speaker 2 (47:22):
Yeah, g in the ninth in the States.
Speaker 1 (47:23):
Yeah, okay, June ninth in the United States, and go ahead.
And they can pre order this on Amazon, Barnes and Noble.
Speaker 2 (47:32):
Yeah, everywhere, independent bookshops. You can order it anywhere, or
get the audio version, the ebook version.
Speaker 1 (47:39):
Yeah, have you heard the audio version?
Speaker 2 (47:42):
Have you heard that yet?
Speaker 1 (47:43):
Oh? My gosh, do you know who they chose?
Speaker 2 (47:46):
I mean, do you have any Yeah? Yeah, so yes.
I got to kind of listen to some different actresses
recordings and like I could be involved in the discussions.
I don't normally listen to my own audiobooks. I just
find it just so thing, just embarrassing about hearing your
own work read out loud. But my dad is really
he loves audio books. And my dad prefers into books
(48:07):
then read them, so he will always listen to my
audio books, and he'll tell me kind of what he
thinks of them. Though, yeah, he's a person. I ask
about the audio stuff.
Speaker 1 (48:16):
That's fantastic. I never thought about that. You wouldn't want
to hear your books in an audio form.
Speaker 2 (48:20):
It's such a strange thing. Well, yeah, I find it
just a little bit total length.
Speaker 1 (48:27):
All right. Well, thank you so much for joining me
today and good fortune with again this immortal heart.
Speaker 2 (48:35):
Very much for talking to me. It's just been such
a dry Thank you.
Speaker 1 (48:39):
You're very welcome.
Well, welcome back murmurd Ons to another episode of Greek
Mythology Retold Podcast. Today, I am delighted to be joined
by the best selling author Jennifer Saint. Jennifer studied classics
at King's College, London, inspired by a lifelong fascination with
the myths, heroes and heroines and the gods of ancient Greece.
(00:43):
She later spent thirteen years as an English teacher which
I really want to hear about that, and sharing her
passions for literature and storytelling with her students before turning
her attention to writing full time. She is the number
one internationally best selling author of Ariad, Electra at Atlanta
and Harah, novels that have introduced countless readers to the
(01:06):
women at the heart of Greek mythology through her vivid
and lyrical storytelling and fresh perspectives. Jennifer joins us today
to discuss her highly anticipated new novel, This Immortal Heart.
Look at how beautiful this is?
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Can you see that?
Speaker 1 (01:23):
That's gorgeous? And it's a story centered on Aphrodite, the
goddess of love and desire and beauty. And we're going
to be talking about Greek mythology the enduring appeal of
these ancient stories, maybe get into her writing process a
little bit and what readers can expect from her latest
journey into the world of the gods. Jennifer, Welcome to
(01:45):
Greek Mythology Retold, Well, thank.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
You so much for having me. It's such a pleasure
to see here.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
I'm very happy to have you. Do you remember the
moment that Greek mythology captured your imagination?
Speaker 2 (01:58):
So I think it's tea far back to really remember
the moment when it's very small. And my parents had
friends who lived in Cypress, so they took us there
in the summer and I was only a toddler. But
there's a photograph of me on the steps of an
amphitheater at a Greco Roman amphitheater, and at Korean and
holding a really gigantic ice cream. And I feel very
(02:22):
positive association made from an early age with the stories,
with the history, with the architecture, And you know, I
grew up just really fascinated by the idea that when
when you go to Cypress, all to Greece, you can
step into the places where these myths took place. There
is this there is this connection between the landscape between
the archaeology there is there are stories that are so
(02:44):
very rooted in a very very real sense of place
and time, and I find it just endlessly magical that
when you tell these stories, when you read these stories,
when you find new ways to reinterpret them, you are
joining this chain of connection that extends all the way
back through millennia to these people who lived very different lives,
(03:05):
who believed very different things, but he shared this at
their core, this interests, this enthusiasm, this reverence for the
same stories that we're enjoying now. I find the survival
of mythology just incredible.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
Is there a place that you specifically had a connection
to because you've been writing for a long time and
then you were teaching, so like, was there a place
that you want that you kind of got sparked?
Speaker 2 (03:30):
So I mean, I come back to Cypress again because
that's a really really special place for me, and it's
the birthplace of Aphrodite. So it's very relevant to this novel,
This Immortal Heart, which is the love story of Aphrodite
and ares in particular Aphrodite's rock in the Bay where
she is told to have emerged from the sea fully formed.
(03:51):
It's such an atmospheric place to visit, truly, and you
just you step down on it and I think, because
it's so wild, because it's so natural, because it's so unspoiled,
you feel that there is nothing standing between you and
the mythology. So I have I mean, I went back
to research this novel. I've taken my children to visit. Yeah.
I was writing my first novel, Ariadne when we went
(04:13):
out there, and to kind of reconnect with that sense
of this is why I love the stories. I can
stand here and I can feel these feelings. Was it
really pushed me on because you get to a point,
especially writing your first novel, and you don't know if
anything's ever going to happen with it. You get to
sort of kind of forty thousand words and you think,
is this a terrible mistake? And it's really helpful at
that point to remind yourself, oh, no, this is what
(04:35):
I love.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
Fantastic. Do your kids do they know you as like
a Greek mythology author or is it just like mom
on a Tuesday, regular stuff? Do they know your famous?
Speaker 2 (04:46):
They find it like incredibly normal. I really like the
idea that they can see having a creative career as
an achievable option, that it's just something that you can do.
I think it really kind of gives them a little
bit of inspiration that perhaps they can follow their own passions.
So I'm really grateful for that. But yeah, my youngest
was he was five years old when I got my
(05:07):
book deal, so he doesn't really remember anything different to that.
But yeah, they do know that when they come on holiday,
they will get dragged around a lot, and.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
It'll be interesting to see how that manifests in their life.
And when you look back at that picture, I'm sure
somehow a seed got planted. And then look where you
are now, So it'll be interesting to see where your
kids end up, you know, being archaeologists or something like that.
So what drew you to Aphrodite to be the central
(05:35):
figure of your of this Lady? Why choose Aphrodite?
Speaker 2 (05:39):
Well, yeah, I mean I asked myself the same question
because I had actually, honestly really written Aphrodite off as
a character as somebody who would ever be a protagonist
in any of my novels. I was doing an event
at Literature Festival a couple of years ago, and somebody
asked me, when if the audience questions was, did I
have any plans to write a romance, a Greek mythology romance,
(05:59):
And I said absolutely not, because there's no healthy romances
in Greek mythology. There's absolutely so you know, I couldn't.
But I think that something about that question must have
really lodged in my mind, because it was only a
few weeks after that that I was thinking about it,
and I thought, oh, but there is Aphrodite in herries.
And at first I thought, yeah, but I couldn't tell
(06:19):
aphredity story. She's not one of the goddesses. I'd kind
of made this shift to writing about goddesses because I
have three novels about mortal protagonists. I have the electron Atalanta,
and then I had written the novel of Hero. And
although here is this kind of intensely dislikable figure from
mythology in so many ways, you know, she kind of
commits all of these various acts of petty, cruelty and
(06:41):
spite and general unpleasantness, I could really easily find a
way into hear. I could really see the ways in
which she'd been misrepresented and the ways in which I
felt that the portrayal of her was unfair with Aphrodite.
I didn't have that immediate in I think that I
felt a little bit, probably put off by the fact
that Aphrodite, she's so shiny, and she's so perfect, and
(07:03):
she's so beautiful, and I thought, where am I going
to find the human core of Aphrodite to tell his story.
But it was the fact of this romance with Aris.
It's the fact of this really epic love story that
exists throughout mythology, in which although Aphrodite has numerous affairs
and she has numerous lovers, she keeps coming back to
Aries and he as the god of war. So you
(07:24):
would think a really hard sell as a romantic hearing.
You would think, you know, this is somebody whose business
is destruction and death and carnage. He is a surprisingly
inoffensive character male character of Greek mythology. Of all of
the gods, he is the only one who was never
involved in assaulting a woman. And in fact, although his
(07:44):
realm his domain is intimately associated with violence, the humans
committing violence against one another, we see him committing violence
against a human assaulter of his own daughter. We are
talking about a very patriarchal culture, and we are talking
gods who behave in various just atrocious ways across the board.
(08:05):
So I'm going to say that the bar is low,
but Ari's pleased with pease in terms of being Actually,
you kind of go, this is a relationship where I
can see there is something so compelling about it. And
this is a man, a god who has got something
about him that keeps the goddess of love. You can
have anybody she wants. He keeps her coming back to him,
(08:28):
And that was a story worth telling. And once I
started to look at Aphrodite through that lens, I just
found so many more things about her that made her
the perfect protagonist for me to take on.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
Yeah, I really enjoyed your take on her because you know,
my research in the work that I've done is primarily
in the Trojan War. I've seen her through a narrow lens.
I think I wasn't really focused in on what she
did outside of the Trojan War. So this was the
eye opening read for me that just gave me this
whole of perspective. She has her own mind, and I
(09:02):
liked how you humanized her but yet kept her as
a goddess that she could have these conflicting feelings about
Love herself, because I always see her as the one
that's interfering with Paris and Helen. I did not ever
see Aphrodite in the way that I did when I
read your book. I think people are going to like that,
and I don't want to say I'm trying not to
(09:23):
say any spoilers. If anybody was to just like google
the the love triangle there, maybe you want to talk
a little bit about that, because that was that was
full of good stuff.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
Yeah, I mean, there's always kind of a bit of
a caffette when it comes to Spiolist and that you know,
some of the offense of the enophl have been public
knowledge for a couple of thousand years. So if you
know about critology, you probably know about aris Aphrodite and Hephiastis.
There's love triangle. I so wanted to take on that
part of the story because that's that's the way in
(09:56):
which I can see Aphrodite as a really subversive god,
because I think that when you see her, like you said,
through the lens of the Trojan War, we're seeing her
through this very narrow and very misogynistic kind of male
gaze kind of way where we're kind of where we're
going here is this war that men are waging upon
each other, which women can we blame for it. Let's
(10:16):
blame and let's blame Helen and say that it's all
their fault, and then all the men can escape all
the culpability for everything. And of course it's used who
are initially wants the Trojan war to happen anyway, So
it always comes to blame on a woman. But when
you have this love triangle, this Aris and Infestus, who
are two brothers, they are both the sons of Zeus
and Hera and Aphrodite, who miraculously is not related to
(10:38):
either one of them. Because again, when it comes to
the gods, there's a whole lot of everybody being related
to one another that can be quite upsetting. It was
quite upsetting when I was telling the story of Hero
because he's his sister. But Aphrodite, she's different. She's born
from the castration of the sky, She's born from the
unmanning of urin Us, and that in itself presents her
(11:00):
this instead of seeing her through the male gaze, and
that's the way that we see her represented in art.
That's why we see her represented in sculpture that we
see her increasingly unclothed, and we kind of see these
statues of her where she's like dropping and her dress
and looking at us really kind of coquettishly over her shoulder.
And all of these ways that we see Aphrodite are
(11:20):
very much shaped by male desires. And you could say, well,
here's this goddess of love and sex who exists in
order to please men, and she absolutely doesn't, and she
absolutely doesn't throughout all of the stories. And I think
you can see that in the fact that she's born
from the ultimate male nightmare of being castrated, that gives
rise to so already, like we can see that she's
(11:42):
challenging and she's destabilizing, but also she's one of the
goddesses who stays unmarried. And I think it's so interesting
that the goddesses of Olympus do stay unmarried. It really
kind of shows you this is kind of how women
take their power, that they are not going to if
they get married, that they are going to give their
power to their husbands. And so the goddess is Olympus,
(12:03):
apart from Hero, managed to find ways to not be married.
But Aphrodite, unlike Athena, and like Hestia, unlike Artemis, she
doesn't take any She is not a virgin goddess. She
is still able to she have as many lovers, as
many male lovers as she wants to be their gods,
be the immortals. She can go ahead and do that
(12:23):
with impunity. She is a woman who makes her own choices,
and again is living more frightening to the patriarchy than
a woman with agency and a woman with autonomy. And
so at one point she is forced into a marriage.
She is forced to marry Hephestus. There is this context,
and he ends up being the winner of it. But
even then she continues to exercise her own choices. She
(12:47):
never has children with Hephestus, so you could kind of
interpret from that that she doesn't treat this as a
real marriage, that she is not going to actually be
Hephaestus's wife. There is, and this is a scene that
didn't actually make it through rounds of editing, but I
did write it. There is a scene in which she
and Aires are caught in a net, actually in the
(13:07):
act of adultery, and all of the God's witness and
the fact that she's not willing to stay faithful. She
is not willing to be tamed. So the love triangle,
it's so much an assertion of Aphrodite's independence and Aphrodite's
ability to choose. I didn't want to make ca Fastus
a villain, but I wanted to explore just the dynamics
(13:30):
of choice and agency within that situation. And there are
so many stories throughout mythology of women who have the
ability to choose taken away from them that I find
it just really refreshing to read Aphrodite's story and find
a woman who never loses the ability to choose.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
That's one of the things that I liked about that,
which was living with her. Vice just wasn't like being
in a cage. She was like living separate together but separate. Yeah,
and you made her fight. He was reflective of the choice,
and he understood his complicity and what happened between the
contest that where he wins and the scene where she
(14:10):
I don't want to I don't want to spoil it
and she but she does have to tell aries. And
that scene was I thought it was kind of heartbreaking
because you could she didn't want to do it, but
she was. She knew she had to you know, it
was the lesser of kind of two evils in a way.
It was it was better to keep the peace in
Olympus than to break her promise, you know, and and
(14:31):
run away because Aries like, just let's run away, we can.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
Yeah, I think I just I wanted Aphrodity to prioritize
ultimately who she is over everything else she she like
I said, she and Aries tease each other, but more
than that, Aphrodite es is herself, and she chooses the
rele that she plays. And I really never wanted to
trivialize what being the goddess of love might mean, because
it's actually such a fundamental, integral part of the human
(14:58):
experience is to love. And if you don't have the
goddess of love, if you don't have love in your life,
whatever kind of shape or one that might take, then
what is the point of everything else that the other
gods are doing? What are you living for? If it's
not to have something that enriches your life and makes
it worth living.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
What do you think is the biggest misconception then? For Aphrodite,
did that influence how you took the perspective that you did.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Yeah, I think it would be that she is insipid,
that by being the goddess of love and by being beautiful,
that that makes her vapid, and that makes her realm
kind of a superficial one. That was really what I
was pushing back against in my depiction of Aphrodite, that
what she does is so important and that she knows
(15:45):
its importance. I was quite interested as soon as I
started writing, and I'd had in my head that Aphrodite
was going to do a lot more of the meddling
in people's affairs than she actually ends up doing throughout
the novel. And that's because I immediately came up against
an issue that really didn't trouble the ancient writers of
the myths at all, and that's the issue of consent. Okay,
(16:07):
Aphrodite is this goddess who is always making her own choices.
So I don't think that she is someone who is
then going to override other women's choices. And so I
had to really make a distinction between you know, when
Zeus is on the prowl, when Zeus is looking for
women and for nymphs and for goddesses, he is not
using Aphrodite's power. He's not doing this with the assistance
(16:28):
of Aphrodite, because what he's doing is not about consent,
and it's not about Yeah, I felt that the bar
of Rapiditi would always be enthusiastic consent. That's not something
that troubles use ever, It's not something that occurs to him.
So I really wanted to draw that distinction between power
and between desire and the ways in which Aphrodite wields
her power. That was something that I just ended up
(16:50):
grappling with a lot through the novel and figuring it out.
And I do include the myth of Pygmalion and Galateaea,
and Pygmalia is really, you know, the original in cell
He is this man who despises women, who takes to
the streets and rails against how awful women are and
like how stupid they are and how vain and how
they repulse him. And so he carves his own woman
(17:12):
out of stone and has a you know, incredibly creepy
relationship with his own sculpture. And Aphrodite is apparently so
charmed by this that she brings the sculpture to life.
I was really wanted to delve into that idea of okay,
she to create this fully formed woman with no experience,
no knowledge, no understanding, no ability to do the things
(17:33):
that Aphrodite has done in terms of ever being able
to say no, and for Aphrodite to actually have to
engage with the consequences of that. So I wanted to
take myths like that and give them a spin and
turn them on their head and actually think is the
outcome here, and you know, how will Aphrodite deal with
the fallout?
Speaker 1 (17:51):
That is a really touchy issue with the Greek mythology,
the issue of consent, the myth with Zeus going after leader.
The artwork that always shows it as sensual and romantic,
that wasn't the experience at all. And I hold in
my mind this idea of this giant swan assaulting a woman,
how terrifying that would be. That's not romantic at all.
(18:13):
But it gets put into some sort of sexualized encounter
that was wonderful for Leeda no way man, very similar
to pacifying the bull, which is, you know, a Poseidon's
curse that he inflicts on her.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
I just these things. Actually you don't have to dig
very deep to say, oh no, this is an atrocity.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
Yeah, absolutely, So what do you hope that readers are
going to understand about Aphrodite by the end of the book.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
I think that what was really fundamental to me for
Aphrodity was that she is a goddess of all kinds
of love, and I really wanted to make that clear
throughout the novel. That she is somebody who is going
to champion everybody's right and ability to love the way
that they want to, and that in doing that, she
is creating a better world, and that there are all
(19:01):
of these forces arrayed against her, destructive forces and even
what Aris stands for war is never going to make
the world a better place, and that's something the two
of them have to reconcile. But what Aphrodite wants to
do is to create a different kind of a world,
and I just I want there to be that kind
of hope that that is something possible and that that
(19:22):
is something realistic.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
And that's such a good message for today's world in general.
We need, we need more kinds of love and empathy, understanding, reflection,
all that. That's great. So Aris, let's talk a little
bit about Aris. I found your ares incredibly like mister
Darcy of Olympia, even though he was a god of war.
(19:46):
I liked his interaction with Aphrodite, but and he was
sort of you know, he's kind of aloof, but you
get the sense of how drawn he is to Aphrodite,
and I think maybe a little bit it kind of
intimidated by her a little bit.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
Talk to us about your eeries. Yes, of course I
loved writing Aris. I really really loved it. Is my
favorite male character that I've ever written. I mean, I
think that mister Darcy plays heavily into her. He's always yeah,
just kind of you know, leaving parties in a really
bad mood. But I when it came to Aries, because
(20:27):
there was so much freedom actually to create this character,
because he doesn't figure in the mythst and the way
that the other gods do. He is this separate figure.
He is this outcast and that nobody wants to really acknowledge,
and nobody really wants to worship him. The sort of
sense that I got was that, Okay, well we need
to have a god of war, because like, war exists,
(20:47):
and we've got to have somebody in charge of it.
But nobody else wants to get their hands dirty. Nobody
really wants Aries around because they find what he does
so distasteful, and yet all of them are benefiting from
it all the time. You know, the gods, of course
benefit from chaos and from violence and from conflict. It
brings them more worship, it brings them more sacrifices, it
(21:08):
brings them more power. So everybody kind of wants to
reap the rewards, but nobody who wants to be ares.
And so he is this, he just exists on the
fringes of Olympus, and it makes him this outcast figure.
But I felt that he would and because he is
who he is, and he you know, he is prone
to his rages and his temper famously, and then his
(21:31):
repactance is just to intrench himself more deeply into like, well,
I don't want anything to do with all of you anyway.
And there's his mister Darcy element. He just has no
time for the rest of them. But when he sees Aphrodite,
he can see that in many ways she is like him,
because love and war they are very different things. That
they are, those very primal elements of the human condition,
(21:54):
those this kind of urge for violence and this urge
for desire. They are both instinctive, and they are both
incredibly powerful. And they are both incredibly intoxicating, and both
of them exists on the fringes of Olympus to some degree.
While Aphrodite has got charm and she's got persuasion, and
she can make everybody love her, so she can move
among the other gods very expertly and very definitely, and
(22:17):
she's still not quite like them, you know, Like I said,
she has this different origin story, she has this different
birth that makes her not like the others. And what
she does is not feared and reviled the way that
what Aris does is, but it's definitely treated with a
lesser degree of seriousness than what the other gods are doing.
(22:37):
And so the two of them do stand apart. They
do have more in common than you would think from
the outside. And I found with Ares that he was
somebody because he exists on the fringes, because he is
never invited in or never welcomed in, he becomes this
really good observer of other people's behavior, and he has
(22:58):
this great understanding and you know, an emotional intelligence that
means that he is very aware of the pretenses people
put up, and the lies that they tell about themselves
and the lies that they believe about each other, and
he can He's got this ability to see through all
of that, and that makes him recognize Aphrodite as something different.
I was also really conscious of the fact that Aphrodite,
(23:21):
this sort of history of how the goddess and her
worship came to be, It does originate with goddesses who
precede her, who were goddesses of love and war. At
the same time, you have these really feracious goddesses who
exist before Aphrodite, who did both. I kind of liked
the idea that if she had sort of the worship
of Aphrodite had had been influenced by the worship of
(23:45):
goddesses like an Anna goddess is like Astarite when she
loses the warmungering part of her self and emerges just
as a goddess of love. Maybe Arees is that missing
part that she lost, and so the two of them
can kind of recognize that within one another that you know,
the romantic in me would say they make each other complete.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
Which ancient sources did you rely on for Aphrodite or
for Aris? And you know, I was just thinking, I'm
jumping head to I think you're the audiences. They think
of aries mostly through the Trojan War, Lens. So I
always envisioned the ares that you're that you were talking
about how everybody sees the glorifying war covered in blood,
(24:24):
reveling in the battle, and so reading him in your
book as the mister Darcy I saw him as the
mister Darcy figure. I had never actually thought of Aris
being in love and having having this whole interior life,
you know what I mean, outside of the Trojan War,
because most people I think relate to Aries through the
(24:46):
Trojan War.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
I just hadn't thought about any of that, not all, No,
I mean, yeah, I think when it when it came
to the Iliad that there was not much from that
I wanted to take for Aries. There was the battle
cry that it's in kind of physical descriptions of Aries
that that I wanted to take from the Iliad. And
there's the fact that he and Aphrodite are you know,
(25:07):
are so together in the Iliad and they're fighting on
the same side, and they are concerned for one another.
So those elements came in. But more than kind of
anything written for Arees, I would say that I came
back to there is a vase painting of Aries and
its Aries after Aphrodite is going to be married to Hephaistus,
and it's it's called something like Aries looking forlorn. He's
(25:31):
just kind of sitting like slumped, kind of looking down
at the ground and like really really miserable. So it
was that kind of rather than any particular stories about Aries.
It was this really emotional portrayal of Aris that I
looked at and I was like, there is his inner life.
There is there is Aries with this broken heart, with
(25:53):
these wounded feelings, and there was Yeah, that that really
inspired me for him, because yeah, when I'm looking at
the ancient sources, I like I'm looking at art and
I'm looking at the written sources as well. There's obviously
kind of a wealth of material about Aphrodite, like far
more for her than for Ares. There's two of them
are in the Iliad, the story of the net the
adultery that comes up in the Odyssey. The Metamorphoses has
(26:17):
so many stories particularly about Aphrodite. So I was using
that and Hesiod's Theogony that's where I took the Birth
of Aphrodite from. So yeah, so I always kind of
I'm always a magpie going from source to source and
plucking out the bits that I like. I found a
huge inspiration this time in Anne Carson's translation of Sapho's
(26:37):
poetry If Not Winter, because these are poems written by
Sappho in the sixth century. It's her love for another woman,
but she's she calls upon Aphrodite so much within the poems,
So there are some really powerful descriptions of Aphrodite, and
there are just some beautiful, beautiful descriptions of yearning and
(26:58):
passion and desire really ready shaped the emotional color of
the novel for me.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
And you really captured that yearning element. I thought when
you follow on book talk or in Instagram, in the
book world, it seems like readers are wanting more yearning
in their novels, and I think they're gonna find that
in this book. Maybe that's why I just felt like
there was a connection between your Aris and mister Darcy,
because there is that element of he's a little he's
(27:26):
dark and brooding, but also in love. And to have
to watch the woman or goddess that he loves knowing
that she has to marry somebody else, I don't know
what else would be so heartbreaking. She has to pull
out from inside of her soul that I'm going to
go through with this marriage that I don't want to do,
but it's for the betterment of my world and for
(27:49):
the peace of other people. It's the right thing to do.
I can't be an oath breaker. And she's true to herself,
but at the same time, you know she's heartbroken, but
she has to push it down and try to distract
herself by living this new other life. And as just
just has to watch it happen and he has to
(28:10):
know about it. That's awful.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Well of all the blazes to your pride, which it's
it's pretty terrible.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
Yeah, I'm curious why did you cut You said you
cut the scene out with the net Yeah, made What
was that decision? Why did you do that?
Speaker 2 (28:25):
So there are always so many scenes that don't make it.
And I because when I'm writing a first draft, I
really love to throw in as much mythology as I
possibly can, and the editing process is quite often just
stripping out the myths that are extraneous, that don't fit,
that don't support the story, or that in this case,
just don't match the tone. The story of aarries nephrodite Internet,
(28:47):
it's really iconic but it's very much it's like a
French face. It's it's kind of absurd and comical. So
as much as I loved writing it, and I really
enjoyed the scene, it was, it kind of tipped it
too far into I just I think that ultimately readers
would have found it so distracting that I think it
(29:10):
would have undermined the emotional resonance.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
So in the end, did it hurt your feelings to
have to cut it?
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Actually I offered it up, I kind of. I'd written
my first draft and I sent it to them, and
I had a list of suggested cuts because there's also
areas and Aphidity have a daughter, and their daughter is
called Harmonia's She's the goddess of I mean, isn't that beautiful,
the goddess of love and war? Make this daughter who
brings harmony and peace? She was in there, she went.
I just lifted her out completely. She didn't belong in
(29:39):
the story of this romance. This was really about how
they come together and how they choose one another. So
kind of bringing in a daughter complicated that as well,
and so I had a list of kind of I
think these strands of the story are going to have
to go as much as it will break my heart
to get rid of them, and because that's what's going
to save this not and you know it's always the
(30:01):
future to tell those stories in a different way.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Well, maybe you can release like a special edition with
deleted scenes. You know how they do that for films.
You will do the director's cut with deleted scenes. You
can give us those. I always want to hear when
authors cut this out or I cut that out, I'm like, oh, man,
we said.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
She did the scenes version. Definitely, Yeah, oh that would
be that would be awesome.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
When I think about that scene and I think about
them being caught in the net, that would be so embarrassing.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
But I like to think for Aphrodity never lets herself
be embarrassed. And I will say, like in the version
of the scene, she puts all the shame back on
Hephaestus and she's like, he created the net. This is fault.
That was like already, dare she try Cathestus? And I'm yeah,
not apologized for it.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
Because it was I mean, he was doing it for
the purpose of humiliating her, yeahd aries, but her being
the woman, she was going to take the blame. I
think yeah, that's what he wanted. I don't know if
it was zaphrod iity of I just did that to me.
I don't know if I would even like him as
a person anymore.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Yeah, well this is because I had Hiphastus as a
major character and hero as well, and in that, you know,
he really is like you really you really feel sorry
for him because he is the child of these parents
who are so awful to each other to him, who've
gotten like, never seem to care for him. In citest
(31:21):
either way that he and Aris turn out, I think
they're very much the products of abusive, horrible parents in
a terrible, controlling, poet of relationship. And you see that
the kind of one turns to this sort of violence
and rejection of everything, and the other one is this appeaser,
kind of always trying to make things beautiful and trying
to make things work out. So I had this huge
amount of sympathy for Hephaestus already, and when I came
(31:44):
to write this story, I thought, you know, he's involved,
like in mythology, in these really unsavory stories as well,
and I'm going to really bring that side of him out.
But when I get him on the page. I just
really like him, I just really do. I find it
really hard to him as a villainous character. I feel
so much sympathy with him, and I think every time
(32:04):
I read the earlyad and the way that he is
treated and the way that he is mocked and laughed
at for his disability, you just cannot feel admiration. I
think for who Hephaestus is that he just keeps making things,
and he is always teaching, and he is always he
like he works. He has a craft and he works
at it, and so yeah, I always think I'm going
(32:28):
to bring in like that horrible story where he tries
to assault Athena and all of these things, and then
actually the Hephaestus who turns up on my pages is
not that god at all. He's somebody much much more
complex and layered.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
Does resonate with the herphasis that makes the armor for
Achilles behast Thetis because he's very kind in his relationship
with thedis.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
The depiction of all of human life, from like the
very very small to the grand. I think, like a
god who can pare that much attention to how humans
live and exist. That feels really fundamental to his character
to me, he has.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
Golden automatons that are women, you know, maids. That's that
seem to be somewhat sentient. Have you ever thought about that,
because when I read that, I'm like, that's crazy.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
Yeah, those are automatons that they're in here. Actually I
do include them, and I include them in like a
really creepy scene kind of when all the gods have
abandoned Olympus and you have these like these very sinister
figures just rolling through silently. They're incredibly sinister. I mean,
but I think I always just took it as well.
He's very technologically forward thinking and he's on the cutting
(33:41):
edge all the time. So yeah, I just I've always
taken it as just an indication of what an incredibly skilled, kind,
preternaturally skilled craftsman he is, and how incredible his accomplishments are.
That's that's the way that I've read it. But like
I said, I'm very sympathetic towards he Festus.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
Naturally, if Hollywood were too call you tomorrow and make
your book a movie, who would you cast as Aphrodite? Series?
Speaker 2 (34:06):
And her feistis I'm absolutely terrible answering this question because
I know I can never remember who any actors even are.
And I can tell you that Aphrodite, I would not
cast her, But I did have real life inspiration for Aphrodite,
and my real life inspiration for how to create this
character was I can tell you, Taylor Swift. That was
because I was thinking. It was when I was thinking,
(34:29):
how am I going to make this beautiful, powerful goddess
relatable to my reader? Not before I even get to
my reader. How am I going to make her somebody
that I can unlock and understand because she feels untouchable
and she feels very removed. And I really came back
to Taylor Swift. I really came back to the way
that you have somebody who is I guess in the
(34:50):
context of the twenty fifth century, a goddess wields incredible wealth,
it's incredible power in social status, has a huge amount
of worshipers. I was at the Aristo Wembley and I
think there were ninety two thousand people in the crowd
that night, you know, And when you are in a
part of something like that, it is I mean, it
is a cult. And I am the Swifties, I'm in
the cult, you know. And I felt like, how is
(35:12):
everybody here feeling as though this billionaire, this like beautiful,
kind of very very distant person is so close to
us and kind of that we understand her and that
she understands us. How is she creating that feeling? And
it's because the way that she writes, the stories that
she tells through her songs, and again, because she writes
so much about love, and Aphrodite is somebody who falls
(35:33):
in love so many times. And I never wanted it
to be cynical, and I never wanted it to feel shallow,
and I don't think you feel that when you are
embracing Taylor's discography, you are hearing somebody who throws themselves
into relationships, into everything she does wholeheartedly with optimism and
idealism and sometimes naivety, but really like all of herself.
(35:55):
And that makes her vulnerable, and that creates an intimacy
between her and her listeners. And that's what I wanted
for Aphrodite, that there would be that fragility, that there'd
be that vulnerability, and that there would be that sense
of intimacy. I think that you just you have a
really difficult cell when you are thinking, who can portray
a goddess who's got to be so very beautiful and
(36:17):
so very perfect, and we've we've got to find the cracks,
and we've got to find the flaws, and we've got
to find the ways in. I don't know if Tailor
can act. I don't know. I haven't seen the movies
that she's been in, and so I'm I'm not saying
that I'm going to cast her, but she she kind
of was as far as I was concerned, the human
version of Aphrodite that I could draw on to just
just to figure out my way into it. When it
came to Aries, I had had a very specific visual inspiration,
(36:41):
and that is from the TV shows Zena and Hercules,
who's an easial inductor. He really tragically died. I think
he was only about thirty eight when he died. And
he's called Kevin Smith. He is so handsome, he is
just so dreamy. I would advise everybody to immediately google
image Kevin Smith Aries. That was my my whole research
(37:02):
was just looking at like photos of him in leather,
and again, like, we can't cast him because, like I said,
he's very tragicised on, but you know, he's my dream casting.
I want it to be him. Yeah, and yeah, and
I didn't. I didn't really have a kind of visual,
real life anchor for Hephaestus. I don't think so nobody
(37:23):
comes to mind for me because I'm not particularly a
visual person. When I'm writing, I don't. I kind of
see my characters in a much more sort of soft
focus way, you know, I'm not. I never really think
specifically about their features that they're kind of They're always
a little bit blurred for me. It's really who they
are inside. So I always find it difficult would who
(37:45):
would actually be the right person to play them on screen?
Somebody from Hollywood needs to call me and like we'll
talk about they do.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
They absolutely do. Everybody is focused on Hades and Persephony,
and I think that if any listeners and readers like
Persephone and Hades, they'll like your Ares and Aphrodite.
Speaker 2 (38:03):
But no, I was going to say, it's the contrast
of darkness and light. But Aphrodite is starting from the
position of somebody much more knowledgeable, experienced, and more in
control than Pansophony. So I feel that in terms of
a healthy romance and something kind of that really has
got that feminist funt to it. She works a little
bit better for that.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
You've written, You've written Ariadne, Electra, Atlanta, Hera, and Aphrodite.
Which of these female characters have dayed with you the
longest after finishing.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
The book, So they all really really have, They're all
really like will live in my heart forever, definitely. I
think Heirah Herah made this really powerful impression on me,
just because I felt so much that I was wrong
about her before I started to tell her story. I
really felt I was one of the people who judged
terror unfairly, I think, and so much of the negative
(39:00):
perception of hero is bound up in misogyny and is
bound up in a kind of agism. I think this
is kind of the way that you know, hair can
be like eternally young and beautiful, I all the goddesses are,
But because she is a wife, she occupies this matronly
space and she's true I never really thought about that before,
and so as a wife, she really embodies these really depressing,
(39:22):
misogynistic stereotypes. And I just when I came to actually
tell her story and to open her up and to
be things from her perspective, which is often a warped perspective,
by Killlectra. She is not somebody who I am always
wholeheartedly championing in everything that she does. But I just
(39:46):
found so much complexity to her, and I thought, because
she's married, is use and she is the queen of
the goddesses. In that respect, she is powerful. And the
way that we talk about hero I think really reflects
the way that we talk about powerful women and the
way that we talk about women when they cease to
be young and beautiful and pliable, in the way that
(40:07):
we think that women should be forever, and that I
think in telling here a story, it did really make
me think about the way that we that we view
women and I found it sobering.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
What grades or levels were you teaching?
Speaker 2 (40:22):
So I was teaching the years old eighteen years old?
Say that's high school in the UK.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
Did you get to teach any of the myths to
your kids or would do you have required ones? Or
I want to hear about that. I want to hear
about your classroom.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
No, the impression that Greek mythology occupies more of a
space on the American curriculum than it does in the UK.
It's not it's not required. You wouldn't have to cover it,
but I always did. I always loved teaching in Greek
mythology because it was it was also it was it
was the way in with kids, and they just loved it.
We would always find that teaching Greek mythology would engage
(40:57):
students kind of across the spectrum. Boys, girls are like,
they were just into it, they really really loved it.
And then once they have that grounding, once you have
that kind of cultural knowledge of Greek mythology, then you
find it everywhere else. So as we go on to
teach the rest of the curriculum. Mean, when we're teaching Shakespeare,
you can say, here is a reference. You know this reference.
(41:19):
You know, like he's mentioning Hikarti in Macbeth for example,
you know who she is, Like we've covered her, and
kids could see then that the way that stories never
exist in isolation, the way that the whole kind of
body of literature is this like twisting branching creation where
everything feeds back on itself and everything calls to Everything
(41:41):
is intertextual, Everything is entwined all the time, which I
just think is so extremely grounding and helps students to
understand kind of where things fit and how perceptions are shaped.
I think when your goal is always to teach students
to ask questions and to think critically, and I think
mythology is a really good space to do that, because
(42:02):
there are differversions of all the stories, because there are
pieces missing, because there are fragments that come to us
and there are gaps. You can ask students kind of
what they think, like if you turn it around, if
you look at things from Ariadne's perspective, if you look
at things from Hero's perspective, what different story do you uncover?
You know, you have this like really kind of shifting
cast of characters that you can keep poking holes in
(42:25):
and you can see how they've been used over and
over again through literature. What different things have they been
called on to represent? And what might that tell us
not just about the stories, but about the different storytellers.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Was it hard for you to leave teaching to write
full time?
Speaker 2 (42:40):
So? Not when I actually did it, because I had
actually when I came to write Ariadne, I had moved
to a different school. I'd kind of been teaching at
the same school for a long long time. I moved
to a different school and it had a very different
ethos is are a much more kind of corporate environment,
and it was one where actually that freedom to be
(43:00):
creative with lesson planning with what we were teaching it
didn't really exist. So I had been being able to
choose the text that I was going to teach my
students and to choose how I was going to teach
them to adapt it to the class in front of me,
and that was just really not the case. And this
is like very much a kind of you will kind
of do this set formula and you will teach the
text that we do across the whole. And there were
(43:21):
like twenty two schools all in this same trust. And
so I found that when I moved to that environment,
I really had no creative outlet anymore. And creativity has
always been such an important part of my life that
without it very quickly started to burn out. And it
was writing Ariadne that kept me going that once I
had completed it, and once I'd found an agent and
(43:44):
sold it to a publisher, I found it easy to
walk away from teaching in the moment. There's sort of
seven years that have passed since I have missed it
a lot, but it's not an environment I would go
back to in the same way.
Speaker 1 (44:00):
I can see that in America we have so I
teach history and English. So in the English department specifically,
there are set texts that you have to use. And
thank god, the Odyssey is part of the freshman curriculum,
and they do chunks of the story, you know, it's
not the whole Odyssey. Yeah, but it's very much regimented,
just like you said, and they don't encourage so much creativity.
(44:24):
You know, you bring in your own sources to the table.
I always try to sneak stuff in and do what
your you do, what you have to do, what they
call them like your priority pieces, but then trying to
like bolster that with like other other things to do
that creative outlet, which is one of the reasons why
I do a podcast. Find it somewhere, Yeah, exactly. So
(44:44):
what's next for Jennifer Saint? What do you what do
you think you might want to be working on?
Speaker 2 (44:49):
So I am raising my six novel at the moment,
and there's not much I can say about it at
the moment because it's in the very early stages. So
in the past couple of months and I got a
puppy and He has completely turned my life upside down
and it's really interfered with the early stages of this novel,
I've got to say. So I've been writing around him,
(45:11):
and so it is another goddess, but it is a
dual narrative with a model woman as well, so there
a few of them and they've kind of against one another.
It's just been really, really fun that I have just
I've so enjoyed writing it, and I think because my
time has been a bit more and a bit more limited,
I've just been so excited to get back to it
every time I can, and so I'm really looking forward
(45:32):
to being able to say more about it. But until
it takes a little bit more shape, I'm not There's
not much I can say that's exciting.
Speaker 1 (45:39):
Do you have any speaking engagements that are lined up
for over the summer in the UK or to the
United States?
Speaker 2 (45:46):
Maybe, well, I would love to come over to the States.
Know it's not on the cards at the moment. Yeah,
I had today as we're talking. The book is published
in the UK on Thursdays, and yeah, I'm going to
go on tour. I'm up in Scotland next week and
then I'm just kind of traveling through the country and yeah,
(46:06):
going to lots of bookshops and literature festivals, and it's
really exciting. It's just a really really it's a part
of the job that I never even imagine because I
want to be an author. I'm just going to kind
of sit alone in a room and write. It opens
you up to this whole whole world of meeting readers,
meeting booksellers, meeting other authors, and it's so much fun.
(46:26):
So I'm very nervous and I'm very excited to get that.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
I'm envious of everybody that gets to go sit and
meet you in person and listen to you talk about
your book. I'm way over here, but at least my
audience and hopefully your audience will find this and get
a chance to see you and hear you. If they
can't make engagement, I so appreciate meeting you and getting
a chance to talk about Let me put this book
(46:51):
up here a long time, Like, how gorgeous that is?
This immortal heart that is the color scheme is fantastic,
This is gorgeous.
Speaker 2 (46:59):
It is that I think is my most beautiful looking
book so fast I love it. I like to wear
lots of things that match my book covers. When I'm
on top and I'm a blonde, I'm really well, so
I'm just I'm really happy they went with that. It
was trickier with Atalanta because that was orange. In the UK,
I found it harder, hard to pull. It's great.
Speaker 1 (47:17):
So the book comes out July or excuse me, June ninth.
Speaker 2 (47:22):
Yeah, g in the ninth in the States.
Speaker 1 (47:23):
Yeah, okay, June ninth in the United States, and go ahead.
And they can pre order this on Amazon, Barnes and Noble.
Speaker 2 (47:32):
Yeah, everywhere, independent bookshops. You can order it anywhere, or
get the audio version, the ebook version.
Speaker 1 (47:39):
Yeah, have you heard the audio version?
Speaker 2 (47:42):
Have you heard that yet?
Speaker 1 (47:43):
Oh? My gosh, do you know who they chose?
Speaker 2 (47:46):
I mean, do you have any Yeah? Yeah, so yes.
I got to kind of listen to some different actresses
recordings and like I could be involved in the discussions.
I don't normally listen to my own audiobooks. I just
find it just so thing, just embarrassing about hearing your
own work read out loud. But my dad is really
he loves audio books. And my dad prefers into books
(48:07):
then read them, so he will always listen to my
audio books, and he'll tell me kind of what he
thinks of them. Though, yeah, he's a person. I ask
about the audio stuff.
Speaker 1 (48:16):
That's fantastic. I never thought about that. You wouldn't want
to hear your books in an audio form.
Speaker 2 (48:20):
It's such a strange thing. Well, yeah, I find it
just a little bit total length.
Speaker 1 (48:27):
All right. Well, thank you so much for joining me
today and good fortune with again this immortal heart.
Speaker 2 (48:35):
Very much for talking to me. It's just been such
a dry Thank you.
Speaker 1 (48:39):
You're very welcome.
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