This episode is brought to you by Snapple, want to know another Snapple fact? The first hot air balloon passengers were a sheep, a duck, and a rooster. Ridiculous! Check out Snapple.com to find ridiculously flavored Snapple near you. This episode is brought to you by Experian. Are you paying for subscriptions you don't use, but can't find the time or energy to cancel them? No one could cancel unwanted subscriptions for you, saving you an average of $270 per year. And plenty of time, download the Experian app. Results will vary, not all subscriptions are eligible. Savings are not guaranteed. Paid membership with connected payment account required. Hey everybody, welcome to the show. This is the Other People Podcast, a weekly program featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers, I'm Brad Listi and I'm in Los Angeles. It's nice to be with you. I appreciate you being here. Don't forget to subscribe to this show. Hit the subscribe button wherever you listen. You can also subscribe on YouTube. Follow me on social media, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and Blue Sky. And so, my guest today is Porachista Hakpur, author of a new novel called Terangelis. It was such a depressing time. And so, this book was the one thing that I could work on that gave me some sort of purpose. And I got more and more interested in it. But it was, you know, it was really challenging. I mean, at one point, I made kind of like a tarantulas altar by my desk with all this like mood board stuff and I would get very superstitious working on it. I started to really think of these characters as very real. And then the panic set in that I don't want to just write this flat, easy, you know, just pure satire. I don't know if there is a pure 100% satire that exists, you know, because I don't think that would ever really interest people as much as they think, you know. So I had to round the satire in a little bit of heart. All right, that was Porachista Hakpur, author of the new novel Terangelis, available from Pantheon. Vogue Magazine says of Terangelis, "Think the Kardashians, meet little women, and crazy rich Asians." An indelible uproarious snapshot of young womanhood. I think that's pretty accurate. I would also say that it is, indeed, a wickedly satirical take on contemporary American culture, class, race, identity, gender politics, Los Angeles, fame and fortune, the values of late capitalism. All of it is addressed in this novel with humor and heart. Porachista Hakpur is telling the story of the Milani family, a father, a mother, and four daughters. They are a fabulously well-to-do Iranian-American family living in Los Angeles in contemporary times. They have made their fortune selling microwavable snacks, and now they are on the precipice of having their own reality TV show. The book is set against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it's just a wildly entertaining family saga that is both heartfelt and very funny. I had a great talk with Porachista Hakpur, and that is coming up in just a moment. A reminder about my weekly email newsletter before we get going. It's over at BradLesty.substack.com. I would love it if you signed up. You can keep up with the show. I let you know on a weekly basis about new episodes and what's going on, and I also share a list of links to things that I've been reading and finding interesting. If you are a regular listener of this show, if you tune in week after week, if you enjoy the work that I do and you want to help me continue to do it, please join the other people Patreon community over at patreon.com/otherpplpod. Help keep this show going into the future. I also want to note that the schedule for this show has been fluctuating a little bit over the course of the summer, and I just want to let you know that I'm trying my best to keep it rolling. I've got kids home from school, stuff going on with work, so I'm just trying to make it all go. There's probably going to be some tweaks to the schedule, but there will be new episodes coming your way week after week, so stay tuned. Today's episode is brought to you by Penguin Press, publisher of the memoir in Essays, The Way You Make Me Feel by Nina Sharma. The Way You Make Me Feel is about love and allyship, told through one Asian and black interracial relationship. Nina Sharma chronicles her relationship with her husband Quincy, and in doing so, she examines how their black and Asian relationship becomes the lens through which she understands the world. This book contains a series of sensual and sparkling essays, often very funny. Nina Sharma is reckoning with a variety of themes and concerns, including cast, race, colorism, and mental health, moving from her seemingly idyllic suburban childhood through her and Quincy's early sweeping romance in the so-called post-racial Obama years, and then onward to their marriage. Again, the book is called The Way You Make Me Feel, A New Memoir in Essays by Nina Sharma. Available from Penguin Press. All right, so my guest once again is Porchista Hakpur. Her new novel is called Terangelis, it is available from Pantheon. Porchista was born in Tehran and raised in the Greater Los Angeles area. She is the author of two previous novels, one is called Sons and Other Flammable Objects, and the other is called The Last Illusion. She also published a memoir entitled Sick and an Essay Collection called Brown Album. Porchista's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The LA Times, Book Forum L, and many other publications. She lives in New York City, and I'm very pleased to welcome her back onto this show for a second time. So here I am in conversation with Porchista Hakpur and her new novel, One More Time, is called Terangelis. Of course, you know, I did do an Essay Collection, that was my last book in 2020, but I just felt like, no, this is The Last Illusion, this sort of fabulous thriller that had to do with 9/11 and Persian Book of Kings, a very weird book, that was my love. And so to deal with this era of rejection, which was brutal for me, I mean, two and a half years, my first book just took a few months to sell, I decided to at least amuse myself and start making a file that was kind of like a parody of their requests. And I just thought, oh, they want women characters, if I wrote a book, all women characters, you know, if I, you know, just wrote a book that was all Iranian women and all of our chaos. And, you know, I just started doing what people often say to do to survive that rejection era, just keep writing, you know, but I already felt I had my second novel, I wasn't ready to really write a third novel, so I started this kind of fun thing for myself to just amuse myself, amuse some of my friends, who I could send snippets to, you know, stuff like that, I wasn't taking it seriously, and then something shifted. Eventually, the last solution got published in 2014, it got sold in 2013, and it got published, but maybe just before then. And then after, obviously, I got very, very interested in this project and sort of ideas started coming to me, and I started to think, what can I do with this? I mean, there was a point at which I was really haunted by creating a valley girl steam stream of consciousness that was like the Molly Bloom chapter in Joyce's Ulysses, I just couldn't stop thinking about it, and I just kept drafting it over and over, and then at another point, you know, I really solidified these four daughters, which most of them, Roxanna had come to me, several of them had come to me, not all of them, but I started getting more and more into the characters and their dilemmas. And so on and off, you know, my third book was My Memoir Sick, then my essay collection, on and off all these years, 13 years, I worked on this book. That's a long way to answer your question, but it took a while for me to get really, really interested in it and to take it really seriously, but it was actually the early pandemic era where this book is set, you know, it's a period piece. That was when I was like, oh, okay, I have a setting. I know exactly what this book is about now, and that brought everything to life and kind of created for me an interesting challenge for the book. So yeah, that's a long way of answering your great question. Well, but I think it's important. I mean, that's the foundational story of this novel, and you were just sort of waiting for a global pandemic in order to crystallize your vision, right, and you, I think you said somewhere that you revised this novel so much, like you say, I'm not a big rewriter, but I've rewritten Terangelis many times, and it made me nervous. Why did it make you nervous? Just because you don't usually do it that way? Well, I've always been a really good problem solver. It's not that I don't revise, but I've always been really interested in fixing things instead of just throwing out pages. I know a lot of writers pride themselves on like, I cut a thousand pages, or, you know, I always used to tell my students this too. Like before you fully cut and move on, see if there's something you can do to actually save it because there must have been something in your original instinct that made it, you know, suitable. So try to explore that before you really dump it. You know, obviously I've thrown away pages, but I always really pride in myself for being good at that problem solving and trying to make things work, I mean, this is also a personality as you have in mind, you know, being afraid of confrontation and wanting to problem solve things and just trying to make everything work. So this book I just had to just keep rewriting. I mean, I had the daughters, I had some things really through the parents, I had certain things that were really fixed, the snack food, pizza bomb, I had certain things that were there, but I was so worried about getting their voices right, getting the time, the era right, and obviously 2011 till now that those are actually several micro eras. Time, you know, goes by so differently than this age we're in. So even just a few years feels like, you know, a whole other lifetime. So I really, you know, I wanted to like, like with this book, we had to make sure a lot of the slang was exactly what people were saying in 2020, not what they were saying in 2021 or 2022, was this emoji even around then, stuff like that. So it was actually quite a pain because period pieces can be easy to write if they're way in the past and you can just settle into some nice research, but this was a really strange research that was like in real time with some delays and then going back. And then, you know, the pandemic for me was horrific because at one point I was living in the epicenter of the pandemic in Queens in New York. And all around me, it was just 24/7, you know, ambulances and we were in a lot of crisis. I was in a building complex with 3,000 people. In the end, I lost seven friends, you know, to COVID and COVID related illnesses, you know, including depression. So, you know, I had just gotten over years of being very chronically ill and disabled. I was in a sort of remission period just before of COVID hit. So I was personally like so many people utterly devastated by the pandemic. So I found nothing funny about the pandemic. I mean, to write a satire about the pandemic sounds pretty unacceptable on many levels. I understand that, but to write a satire about the mishaps around the pandemic really interested me because our government was dropping the ball in all sorts of ways. I mean, the Trump's circus was so horrific, you know, the stuff people were saying, the conspiracy theories, the super spreader parties, the rise of influencers in that era. It was a total circus. So I tried to focus on everything there, not just in the book, but also for me as a human to survive because every day, you know, I was sitting there in Queens, barely recovered from very severe illness, thinking... Was this Lyme disease? Yeah, Lyme and a whole trajectory of illnesses related because in 2017, 2018, in my old apartment in Harlem, they did a bunch of pretty illegal renovations and demolition and eventually the roof came down on that apartment of mine. And so for months, I was getting sick and sicker and there was, you know, this was an old pre-war landmark building that had never been gutted. And so I was reacting to all sorts of things, probably asbestos and lead, but also mold and all sorts of stuff and living at random people's houses, trying to save myself as we discovered more things about that apartment. So all sorts of things can trigger. Lyme relapses mold as a big one, but so are other things with toxins and all that. So I was very sick and didn't even have a stable place to live for years. And then we discovered more things like I had Ehlers-Danlos, I had, you know, my pots was a definite and it was pretty severe, pots or disautonomias, they call it. It's pretty bad fibromyalgia, I discovered, you know, so many other illnesses came out of this period, so I was also crowdfunding and going to proper doctors. So it was a really destabilizing time and I was just going day by day thinking how to survive and, you know, I finally had a stable, nice apartment that felt healthy enough. And then, you know, I wasn't working full time, I used to work 10 million jobs frantically to pay my rent. During the pandemic, I was trying to see if I could stretch some of that crowd fund money and just do a little bit of work here and there so I could work on my health. So it was a lot of a low in time at home trying to think how do I structure my day? I did become one of those bakers, you know, you could serve people who did sourdough, there's people with big cakes, that was me, there's people with shades or head, you know, they did all sorts of things to cope with that. But one of the things that I also did was I spent a lot of time on TikTok. I spent a lot of time researching young people of that era for this book, but also, you know, ended up kind of like helping me too, you know, brought something light-hearted and interesting to my day, there was a lot I didn't understand and, you know, also I would contact some young people I knew and ask them questions and I was in a period where we were all like all over the world. We were sending each other voice memos and just trying to, you know, survive the day, we're still in the pandemic. I always remind people, but that early pandemic period, you know, that first year, that was something else. Well, and I was going to say the fact that what has been born of that dark experience or that set of dark experiences is a book as sort of fun and funny. It's not without its darkness, but it's, this is what I would call like a pop satire. Like I don't know if that's how you would categorize it, but the cover, which I quite love is this burst of color and this is a book that sort of screams fun from the cover. It's fun to read this book. It wasn't fun. Yeah, it wasn't fun, as you said, to be a chronically ill person living in Queens in 2020. That makes a certain psychological sense to me that you would channel your anxiety and on way and difficult emotional stuff into a work like this. Like this is the reaction. I mean, I was devastated in that era and I was, I still, I found some tweets of that era where I was saying things like, I think the whole country is just going to let us die. And I was going back to that like 9/11 era where we felt like, okay, the country cared about us on paper, but they didn't really care. I had friends from L.A. sending me like boxes with toilet paper and grains and things like that. But I really was, I was like, this, this is how my story ends. Like they're just going to do nothing and we're all. So I was, I was, I went from a lot of panic to just this sort of really weird numb depression. And then when my friends started dying, I mean, I was just, I was in a really bad state. I would spend hours and hours on Twitter. So I was just arguing with people, you know, just, I was, there's parts where I talk about one of the characters, Roxanna, like killing days on Twitter, just being annoying. And there were moments where I was like, oh, that's, this is me right now. Hey, who among us, who among us has not killed a day being annoying on Twitter? But it was such a terrible dark time and I was so alone and I was, you know, too scared to spend my, my money that I was using on my health on therapy and I would go to some therapy and panic about losing money. And, you know, it was so, it was such a, such a depressing time. And so this book was the one thing that I could work on that gave me some sort of purpose. And I got more and more interested in it, but it was, you know, it was, it was really challenging. I mean, at one point, I made kind of like a tarantulas altar by my desk with all this like mood board stuff and I would get very superstitious working on it. I started to really think of these characters as very real. And then the panic set in that I don't want to just write this flat, easy, you know, just pure satire. I don't know if there is a pure 100% satire that exists, you know, because I don't, I don't think that would ever really interest people as much as they think, you know, so I had to ground the satire in a little bit of heart and have it have something like empathy, certainly empathy, but something else that I don't have a word for really. So I really did not just want to write like, I didn't want to just make fun of things, you know, I don't find that to be very interesting. So I during that period as I was in this really pretty severe depression and trying to get into the footing of this book, the part that that took me the longest was trying to make sure that I could find a way of understanding these characters so I could care for them. And so their trajectories could not just connect with readers, but could really connect truly with me. And that that was hard because yeah, there, these are pretty messy people. As we all are, obviously, but they were messy in a way that I didn't relate to because I didn't have personal experience. I'm not, there's no character in this book that shares an age with me from, and then class certainly. So okay, let's give listeners who have not read the book yet, like kind of an overview of the plot. You basically are telling a family story about a family called the Milanis, and you have Alan Homa, who are the parents, and then their four daughters, Roxanna, Vanna, Violet, Haley, and Mina, is that right? Yep. And they are living in Los Angeles in what is known as Terangelis. And I should say it's known as Terangelis to people in the Iranian Daspora and to people who might live here in Los Angeles, or people who have, I don't know, maybe some knowledge of Los Angeles. But I think there may be a lot of people out there who don't even know what Terangelis is. So maybe we should explain that to people because it's the title of the book. It's actually so funny. Some people that don't know, I've heard people call it Tefranjals, like Tehran and Angels, and I thought, that's kind of beautiful, actually, I don't mind that pronunciation. And then some people thought I invented this term, which I was like, no, no, no, it's a very well-known portmanteau, at least for us. So some people call it Little Persia, but it's a neighborhood in LA. It's very wealthy enclave here, mostly wealthy, of Iranian Americans. We've got Westwood, Belair, Brentwood, Beverly Hills, some of Santa Monica, I think counts. It's this Westside, Iranian, affluent Iranian enclave. And when you go into that area, there's signs in Persian, and you hear us, everybody's speaking Persian. We say, of course, in our language, Farsi, everywhere. So it's been like this for decades. This is where a lot of Iranians came, right after the revolution and after the Iranian Rock War. So when we came to the US in the early '80s, we didn't live anywhere close to that, because we didn't have that kind of money. We lived in the San Gabriel Valley, but we would always go, like, sometimes even once a week, we would go to the little markets or to get some cholocabob, you know what we call our kabob dishes, or bastani, which is like Persian ice cream, and we would always drive out there. And most Iranians who live in Southern California always go over there for something or another. So it's dear to us. And then later I was like a shop girl in Beverly Hills on Rodeo Drive, which Rodeo Drive for a lot of Iranians feels like a very tarantulas street, you know, you see quite a lot of us. So yeah, it's that neighborhood in, and I think I was a little nervous giving it that title, even though I think it's the right title. But for me, personally, if I could have put it aside in there, I grew up in the San Gabriel Valley. First we were in El Hamra, Monterey Park, and then we were in Pasadena, and then South Pasadena, right on the border of Pasadena, a little apartment district called Raymond Hill. So I still think I should be in the, I should count as a tarantulino, you know, that should still count, but that's a footnote, because the highly visible Iranians in this state are really the 1%, and they've dominated a lot of the discourse, even though most of us do not fit in that category at all. Well, my old landlord, Reza, was Iranian, kind of, I mean, I really liked him, but he had like this kind of gruff, but underneath, like, very nice, you know, and I got along with him, and I was just like talking to him, and the house that I lived in, it was nice, but it was old and, I don't know, it needed work, basically. Incidentally, he later ended up raising it to the ground and building like some mansion on the property or whatever, but. Probably a McMansion, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's the way of LA, but I remember talking to him and just being like, so like, you know, you're in the real estate game, he's like, yes. And I was like, oh, so you just do this, you own homes and rent them out, he's like, he said something like, I own 175 properties in Moscow, I was just like, holy shit. And I was like, you must be, I was like, you must be doing well, he's like, my daughters, my daughters will have everything, you know, like he's like still paying off the mortgages, but they're going to inherit like this empire of like rental properties that just is going to be generating a monthly check of like, you know, whatever, $700,000. Yeah. That's a very savvy, tarantulas energy. Yep. There were a lot of Iranians who were very good at coming here and figuring out how to make a lot of money, which was why, you know, my brother and I were like, wow, why are my parents? Yeah. Why didn't I get that? Yeah. Why didn't I get that gene? Like just understanding how to work the system. Amazing. Amazing. Why people know how to hustle for sure, they can survive anything. Hey, you guys, it is summertime. It's beautiful. It's hot. It's sunny. There's a lot going on. And before you head outside, be sure to fuel up with factors, no prep, no mess meals. These are chef crafted meals, fresh, never frozen, dietitian approved and ready to eat in just two minutes. So what are you waiting for? Make today the day you kickstart a healthy new routine. These are easy, nutritious options made with ingredients you can trust, and it helps keep kitchen time to a minimum, no shopping, prepping, cooking or cleaning up. So get to it. Head on over to factor meals dot com slash other PPL 50 and use the code other PPL 50 to get 50% off your first box plus 20% off your next month. Again, that's code other PPL 50 at factor meals dot com slash other PPL 50, get 50% off your first box plus 20% off your next month while your subscription is active. One more time. It's called factor. Check it out and eat good food. Hey, it's Kaylee Cuoco for Priceline ready to go to your happy place for a happy price? Well, why didn't you say so? Let's download the Priceline app right now and save up to 60% on hotels. So whether it's cousin Kevin's kazoo concert in Kansas City, go Kevin or Becky's bachelorette bash and Bermuda. You never have to miss a trip ever again. So download the Priceline app today. Your savings are waiting. Go to your happy place for a happy price. Go to your happy price, Priceline. So Terangelis is kind of this broad west side network of communities. There's home, you know, home to a lot of members of the Iranian diaspora. And this is very much a novel about place and identity. And part of the fun of the kind of satirical aspects of the novel, it's like funny and heartbreaking at the same time is that you have this family, Allan Homa and their four daughters. They're very wealthy and they're very wealthy because Al has invented something called, which I think you said earlier, pizza balm, if I'm pronouncing that properly. That's perfect. Yeah. It's like pizza with B-O-M-M-E at the end. It's got this kind of like French flair and yet it also has some sort of like military industrial complex vibe happening, but it's almost like quintessentially American. You know, it's like, oh, that could maybe work. But in this novel, Al has made a fortune selling what is, in essence, the competitor to Hot Pockets. It's like a doughy ball filled with like melted cheese, which sounds delicious. And they are living like very well in Beverly Hills, I guess. Is that where they're living? I'm trying to... Yeah. It's a little... I tried to create like a little bit of an imaginary neighborhood. It is basically Beverly Hills and Bel Air, in my mind, with a little bit of Hollywood Hills, you know, but it's essentially that, yes. Okay. And the daughters who are distinct, you know, you've kind of created four distinct personalities and sets of interests and in them, I guess as people are, you know, everyone's different. And they are primed to have their own reality show. There's a production company that is interested in them. These daughters are all gorgeous to greater and lesser extent. But this is a genetically blessed family and these daughters are stunning. And they're super rich, like money is no object for these people. And you have Roxanna, who is the second oldest, who is like her father's daughter. She's the Spitfire, she's a little unhinged, but she's bright and she's shrewd. And she's this person who knows how to work the system, right? Like, this is a person who is going to thrive in late capitalism. She's got it, yeah, like she's shameless, you know what I'm saying, like mostly shameless. And they are going to go for this reality series. She's kind of the star of the show, she's the Kim Kardashian of the family in essence. And she has, you know, but to kind of go back to what I was saying about the satire and the theme of identity in this book, she has been telling her schoolmates that she is Italian. This is something that's been a running like a recurring thing in her life to just claim Italian identity based on her personal appearance. She like, you know, she could pass for Italian with dark hair, dark eyes, whatever. And then she's also changing her zodiac sign, which is hilarious, but like literally having like a transplant, she wants to be, I believe, a Scorpio instead of a Gemini. So identity is at the core of this thing. And it's very funny, but as the book progressed for me, it became like deeper. It becomes deeper. It's a deeper concern that is sort of undergirding the popular aspects of the novel, right? And I'm just curious, is Iranians claiming to be Italian a thing? Yeah, it's very funny, it is kind of a thing. It's a thing in a little bit of a different way. I mean, I think about like the 9/11 era, right? Or even earlier, the years after the hostage crisis, I remember very vividly even though I was a small child, their Iranians really wanted to hide. I mean, that's when you heard a lot of Iranians first get very adamant about using the word Persian. There's different reasons why Iranians say Persian, but a lot of Iranians, okay, that's a good way to like make it look warm and fuzzier. But then there was also this panic to just, oh, if you were faced with someone who was xenophobic, Islamophobic, just plain racist or all the different layers of bigotry you can find when people hate Iranians, you know, then there was this great temptation. I still remember a woman saying to me and Iranian woman saying, well, we're a Eurasian. And I'm like, Eurasian, what's Eurasian? She's like, it's fine, just say that, they'll get it, you know? And I do remember a cab ride I have after 9/11 in New York, and the guy, the driver was Italian, and he assumed, he made an offhand remark about us being Sicilian, and I was like, okay, you know. I'm Sicilian. Yes. So this is what I was complimented, you know, that's kind of great. I think Sicilians do have some Arab blood that we probably share, you know, sure, why not? But I thought, oh, that could be safe, right? I'm not going to, I'm not going to correct this man, because he was going on a really wild rant about Muslims and just Middle Easterners in general. And at that point, even though, you know, Iranians were not the hijackers, we were not the people who were just like, these people in this region, they're all the same. The Islamic Republic funds everything, it's all the same, you know, they're bad. This is a problem region. I just saw an influencer the other day say, oh, you know, the Middle East is an armpit of a region. We just don't need it. We just need to not think about it, you know? And it's like that attitude, she probably thought she was doing something saying that, like it was something novel, but horrible, you know, bigots have been saying that forever. So, you know, while I've never said, like, I'm Italian, I personally have had that temptation. I know a lot of Iranians who have, you know, who've been seen as Greek or Italian, you know, they've had the privilege of passing being like me like pale, olive, lighter skinned. I mean, my father is much darker skinned. I've members of my family, the skin tone spectrum with Iranians is huge, you know, you could be very pale to very dark, so it sort of depends on how you're perceived. And when we say privilege of passing, it's obviously a very double edged privilege, you know, because it's also a mess in your head and weird things happen and it's very complicated. So, so, so it is, it is a bit of a thing, but the way Roxana handles things, and I think this is Roxana in general, she takes everything to its extreme. So she runs with it. I mean, she has a boyfriend who's Italian-American. And so she realizes the last name Mulani, ooh, like Mulan. She's very obsessed with fashion, so she knows Mulan. And so she realizes she could be very easily interpreted as Italian, especially since, you know, pizza bomb could, you know, it's pizza, Italian, this is, you know, Italian-American, why not? And she knows her dad is going to kind of back this up in a way because Al doesn't really want to be seen as anything but American anyways. So, so she kind of gets away with it, you know, in the way that younger people don't really explain too much about themselves when they're in school, especially if they're surrounded by other affluent people, you know, like the way Roxana was. And she's a content creator, she's a very successful influencer. So she's able to control her own narratives always, so she's used to that, you know. She's been making her own money for years, even though she has daddy's money. So she feels very confident doing this, except when the pandemic hits, these sisters were all kind of siloed who had their own life, I mean, they're all kind of influencers or content creators to some degree. But they're now stuck together and she realizes, oh my God, there's people in my own family who don't realize I've done this. And she hasn't thought it through, like to help be in high school with me and now what am I going to do, you know. And so this is a secret she shares with one of the sisters that she was in high school with, that sister happens to be Nina, the Lonnie, who's the character. I feel closest to and I really adore. And she's like, I am not okay with this. And what are you going to do with the show where we have to talk about this? And they end up being adversaries for a period and then Nina does some stuff, that's not all great. But it's so identity, I've always been interested in identity, everything I've written involves identity, I'm fascinated by Iranian and American identity and then the combination and how they play together, you know, how those planes intersect in kind of disturbing ways often. So for me, trying to imagine Gen Z grappling with that and in this era, it was pretty interesting. Well, there's like a, like a, there's like a melange of influences that I could feel, I was actually gratified in doing prep for this interview to learn that some of my instincts, like it confirms some of my instincts about the book, I could kind of detect the book's DNA, at least in park. And I want to talk about it because as I was saying earlier, you know, pop satire, but with like darker undercurrents and deeper concerns around like things like identity. And just to kind of give at least a partial list of influences on this novel, Little Women at Louisa May Alcott, The Kardashians, Breddy Stinnellis, and in particular maybe less than zero, which is a book about young people in LA. Yes, I mean, glamorama, American Psycho and less than zero, I would say are three books that he's written that really stayed with me when I was writing this, I even read glamorama and parts of American Psycho and then less than zero, I've always loved, you know, it's I have it memorized practically. So yeah. And then Crazy Rich Asians, the Kevin Kwan novel. Yes. Definitely. That is it. So am I missing anything? Is that it or is that? There's a little bit of that Molly Bloom Joyce thing, but that's sort of its own thing in a way. But yeah, those are the main ones for sure. I mean, when Kevin Kwan's Crazy Rich Asians came out after I had already thought of this book, but when I read the Crazy Rich Asians series, again, it was in the early pandemic. I just got obsessed with that trilogy and I just started reading everything Kevin had written, you know, my publicist, I cannot double day was sending me some of his books because, you know, we're in the same umbrella publisher, right? So I just was obsessed and I thought these books were so good. He's so excellent at this kind of satire and it gave me courage to write like a crazy rich West Asians, which I told him, you know, we've now messaged quite a bit. He blurbed this book and he was so lovely about it. He told me he'd been to like an amazing Persian wedding. He gets it. You know, he knows this community very well and so he was really gracious and I was so honored because Kevin from me is an absolute master and just one of the greatest writers living today, I think. So he was, when I read his work, it gave me a lot of courage in this redrafts I was doing to just go fully go there all the way, don't be apologetic, don't be like trying to explain things too much or feeling self-conscious about the hyper-capitalist, you know, commerce obsession in this book, like you have to do that to make the book real, you know, and hopefully people will understand that that's not my heart, that's not it, that this is satire. So, you know, I'm not like yay capitalism in 2024, but yeah, he was huge for that. And you know, I know Bred Easton Ellis is divisive for a lot of stuff that he said over the year. I mean, I don't keep up with a lot of that stuff anymore. I know he's, I don't know, he was someone, when I read American Psycho ages ago, which was like, you know, a capitalist horror story. It was really profound for me, especially the scary stuff, of course, is something, right? But the other stuff, the sort of digressions, you know, if we could call it like a movie dick, the digressions for me in that book are the music reviews, you know, those little interludes that he has. I absolutely loved it. And so, in this book, you have these young women doing, and the mother doing these little essay sections, which are like little reviews, but they're also like confessionals that the producers want them to do so they could have another dimension to the show because they're not getting what they want from these girls when they're sending them like video diaries, you know? So, so you have Bred's work, it was really profound for me. I really think, and then the glamorama, how like every sentence mentions a brand name, they're so relentless, you know? I had to research brand names so much, you know, I said in an interview, like I wasn't really even sure what Fendi home line or the Bentley home line was like, you know, I was like, okay. Yeah, I was reading this being like, God, how does she know all this stuff? Like, I felt like, I got anxious, it makes me anxious to read like brands and like people talking about their Versace this and their pumps from, I'm just like, okay, like, I can't even believe this is real. And yeah, all of it's real, I had to go back and make sure all of it was real in this and I just like, there's a mother has like a signature fragrance in one room or something. I had to research that. These are things I know nothing about, you know, but I had to, you know, go there. It makes me anxious too. Like, I was just like, you know, you know, but here's the thing. Here's the thing is that this book, like there's a, there's a silliness to it almost where you're like, oh my God, these people are unserious, right? Like, it has the sort of effective reality TV, right? They're making a reality show, but you're reading them on the page and their concerns and their daily activities and their worldviews and the things that they're hung up on. And with the exception of Mina, who is the sort of bookish queer, younger sister, who I think you said is your favorite character, the character you probably could relate to the most, you know, most easily. But what I kept noting to myself was, like, yeah, this seems like a wild satire, but it's actually really not that far from a certain reality that we often see portrayed on television. On our computer screens, and it's like representative of a value system that I got to say, I find pretty repellent, like this sort of like hyper capitalist, you know, like, we just have endless money and we love to flaunt, like, you know, all that kind of stuff. Or we're just like really interested in like, who's got the most likes or who has the coolest handbag or whatever, you know. But you said in a previous interview, I want to quote it, you said, I think all my fiction has been darkly comic with elements of satire. That's where I am most comfortable always. It's what I like to read and it's really sort of my worldview. I think it's very Iranian also to laugh at tragedy. And it's that last line that I think strikes me the most is that there is an element for all the fun and for all of the money is no object sort of craziness of it all. There's something tragic inside of it, right? There's something tragic about this value system and this pursuit. And I think at the core of it, it is this family's relationship to its own identity and specifically its relationship to its Iranian heritage. And it's in every single one of them. I think most specifically Roxanna and Al and Homa, that's where I felt like it was most crystallized because no matter how far away they may be and no matter how long they may have been in the United States and no matter how much they are thriving, there is a part of their identity that will always be deeply and inextricably Iranian. Absolutely, yeah, that's a central anxiety for all the characters you mentioned and maybe all of them in a way but be most pronounced and them for sure. I mean, there's a point where Roxanna Panix about the concept of legacy, she's just really learned that, you know, and she's thinking about that quite a lot and she's like upset at her dad and she's like, "Why don't you care more? This reality TV is an opportunity for us to cement our legacy," like we're just known as like snack food heiresses, like it can't just be about pizza bombs, it's got to be something bigger, you know, and she's like literally having a panic attack and melting down and just, and I thought that was kind of interesting, I mean, I don't, you know, my personal views, I also find this stuff repellent, you know, I'm more of a socialist than anything, you know, I don't believe in billionaires. I don't believe in the one percent, I don't like, you know, I remember I dated somebody once, it was like an inheriting multi-millions and I went to his Hamptons mansion, his family's Hamptons mansion, it was just, I never felt more like lonely and cold and sad and it was so hideous and horrible and then like going to a citarella and the Hamptons of these like perfect one housewives, like just looking at me and my flip flops and my ripped clothes, you know, just, I look so shoddy and I just thought I would just, if I lived in this world, I would, I would kill myself, like there's no way, like I could survive. I'm not saying, yeah, it's so great to be poor because we, you know, growing up like lower middle class, low income, like that's not, you know, I don't want to say that I'm so happy that was the case but, but I, that I don't relate to this stuff, that that wasn't my daily life, like I do also think that's a blessing because I really felt bad for these characters, I felt like they were trapped and that comes in in a big way with the youngest daughter, Haley, like who becomes like Maga, she becomes like a Maga conspiracy theorist at one point and she's very young, so I could kind of say to myself, okay, she's trapped, going through phase, she's read the stuff online, she doesn't know what she's doing but it was really hard for me because I could see how easy it is for the, for the wealthy to go there. That's why I really treasure Mina because she knows even though they are 1% that, that this isn't it, this isn't the reality of it, all the characters at one point or another say, oh it's fine, money solves everything but of course it's like, irony is they're in the pandemic, early pandemic era, like some of my friends who died. They were extremely wealthy and had great access to healthcare, like it, COVID does not discriminate, you know, and so that's, money doesn't obviously solve everything. It solves a lot, I wish I had more, but it doesn't solve everything and so they're dealing with that and it really was something, again, I had to research a lot and really think about and think, is there a world in which I can feel for the 1%, like is it possible, how could I understand this and it was really just through their Iranianness and their marginalization that I could kind of get in there and really explore it? I mean, even the Iranian tendency to love campy things, you know, like when we did the cover that you mentioned, I love the cover so much, we have, it's an incredible town to designer, a freelance designer that, that Pantheon got Philip X Suso, I think is how you say his last name, really amazing guy and his covers are amazing and I remember saying to Khannaft, they had, first they had a woman's face and I was like, no, no, no, no, he said, we, we could not just have a woman's face and it was very tastefully done and I said, what about a Persian cat? There's a Persian cat in this book and for me, that Persian cat is almost like a deity of this book, why can't we have, we have an opportunity to put the cat on the cover and I thought they'd say, no, you're being silly and then my editor was like, wait a sec, let's ask the designer, you know, and he came back and it was like a slightly more tasteful cat and the flowers were slightly more tasteful and I said, listen, you don't have to worry you're not going to offend us, like the Persian aesthetic, we are a little bit like loud and flashy and campy, we love that stuff, you know, like it doesn't matter if you're rich or poor but that just tends to be our aesthetic, you know, you can kind of go crazy here. So, so that was also like really fun and to try to weave that into this book and to try to sort of like explain it and understand it and make sure like have like outsiders understand and I can see, I don't like to read tons of like good reads reviews or things like that but I have to take it a little bit of a peek and I can see some people are not getting certain things or they think like, oh, you know, these people are horrible, why would I want to write a book about them or, and I just think, oh, that's where I'm Iranian, like we have a different sense of humor about things, we've lived with a different sense of humor when we're laughing at things, it's not that we're being flippant, it's that we are trying to survive certain things. So there's been eating disorders for instance in this book, there's a lot of that and that's something that's been in my family, it's been in my life, it's been my friends lives and we all have a very dark sense of humor about that because that helped us survive something that was so taboo and so harrowing. And so it's, I had to write about it realistically, what I do love is is that in the Australian New Zealand edition, they actually have a page with like eating disorder, hotlines and help lines and things like that and I love that, I wish, I hope for the paperback in the US edition we can do that too, I would have loved that in this but the, but the point is like this is very real for us and it's something that Iranians will just discuss very flippant, like diet culture is just discussed very differently among Iranians. Not just in my world but in worlds I've observed and so it's, I try to explain that and try to, but again like Kevin Quand like does a great job of like having you know the East Asian world that he's describing be just there unapologetically and he's trusting the right readers to understand what he's doing so that trusting the reader part was challenging for me. I'm glad this book's coming out like when I'm 46 I don't think I could have written this as my first book but I was like in my late 20s you know that's hard to do. So people sometimes are like how did a book that's like a page turner like this or it's kind of fluffier than your other books, why would that have taken you 13 years but to get all these things right and to have like some of the maturity to survive some of the more spicy or risque aspects of it I think I needed to be like middle aged you know. Yeah I mean not to be flipp but like when I was reading the book I couldn't help but like try to, I think this book sort of even if you're a guy like I was like trying to pick out like witch sisters I was most like I was like who's the orthorexic sister is that the word for it? Hayley. Hayley yeah. I was like I'm like I mean I don't know if I'm orthorexic but I'm very health conscious but I was like I'm sort of vibing with Hayley on that level and then Mina I think I'm some combination of Hayley. I love that so much. I talked to someone yesterday who just loves Roxanna and was like actually and she put it really amazingly. She's like I'm a Roxanna son with a Hayley Rysie and a medium food and I love that so I get it okay. And you know just to kind of circle back a little bit to something we were talking about earlier with respect to this theme of identity and the darker undercurrents of the book and reality versus satire is that one of the great things about this novel is the way that it can sneak up on you and that Molly Bloom soliloquy that you talk about from Joyce. I mean these are interesting bits of DNA for a novel like this and to have a pop kind of novel have like a James Joyce influence and Ulysses no less I mean you know it's like the full Joyce but that's where I think this book sneaks up on you is where suddenly Roxanna who's this brash on apologetic sort of like hyper capitalist teenager suddenly goes on a confessional and has a panic attack and reveals her humanity in a way that's really actually deep and affecting and it sort of goes you go whoa you know like I thought we were at a party here you know like but it you know what I'm saying like there is like a mash up there's like a mash up of those things happening that I think is really where the book is most interesting for me and where these characters and where these characters become most affecting and most human. That's a dream for me that's what I hoped you know to give Roxanna like that final chapter but also give her at these moments of reflection with her family I mean that those were very hard to write because Roxanna is one of those people like the minute she gets serious she has to be like like undermines it you know we all have friends like that we're like oh shit I'm getting really deep just kidding you know like that we can't handle the vulnerability you know she's one of those people but I really felt like I really wanted to give her a little bit of that you know she has a little bit of a rapid coming of age in this pandemic era they all kind of do in a way and I even I saw this happen to some of my own friends you know we're much older obviously and they really changed in that era and you got I mean pandemic just gave us early pandemic give us so much time for self reflection which was giving people you know in this hyper capital society giving people time for once right time by themselves you know to actually think a lot comes up and not all of it is pretty and a lot of it's really difficult so I wanted to give her that that moment I mean I have a sequel in my mind where Roxanna she changes a lot and and she's but it's it's not like she changes the way you think like I don't think Roxanna is going to be like the perfect model citizen who's going to do community service work and and is is going to be someone you and I would hang out with but I think like I'm interested in how she grows up and and I also feel like Roxanna like her relationship to those early relationships you have you know that that's also pretty formative for all of us I think back to like my first boyfriend that I had when I was 17 and how much that affected my life and and Damien is somebody you know not to give too much away but like Damien really like gives her this incredible gift at the end which is like I understand and she's not ready for that she's like wait what right you forgive me for all these lies and I'll and he's like I love you I'm with you and that for me was like was very difficult to explain why somebody would have that reaction and and what that would be like these young people undermining themselves and self sabotage for me is a really fascinating topic because I expectedly moving yeah yeah because can't you imagine I mean in a way like it's it's actually quite hard to imagine but in our era we're Gen X imagine if we had been like on TikTok all the time and somehow brands gave us deals and maybe we became some sort of content creator a youtuber like that's really really hard you're you're having to monetize your personality and people are reacting to it all the time you know I was watching like the D amelios Charlie and Dixie and like Addison Rae and I was watching them super young go through all this and people reacting to every little thing and them having these sponsorships and brand deals and all this stuff like and then having moments where their humanity would break through and people would suddenly be like whoa wait and then other people would be like wow this is so vulnerable this is amazing you know so it's it's a very interesting time that I think is I mean I do think Gen X and Gen Z do understand each other they are like our children right I don't have kids of my own but if I did they'd be this age and maybe we understand millennials and boomers a little less but the world they've created I don't know if I would have survived it honestly yeah it's a lot I mean I have a 13 year old daughter who's like right in the sweet spot of all this and I don't I'm like the grumpy dad who like won't let her have social media I'm like no I'm scared I'm scared I'm like listen I don't think this is good for kids and all these kids are anxious and depressed and you know seeing therapists not that that's bad but it's like right the numbers are striking yeah their lives are hard and so yeah I think like you know there's plenty of time to try to become an influencer and get a brand deal whatever which I find depressing you know in some ways but it is depressing I mean I'm hoping your daughter is she Jen Alpha now let's Jen Alpha right I don't know she's 13 so I don't even know how it all breaks out I think it is but I think it's gonna be different you know the back the pendulum swings though probably the backlash I already see some of the younger Jen's ears just they like can't stand TikTok they can't stand some of this stuff so I have hope in that way but yeah it is I don't think if I had a child they would absolutely there's no chance they did on social media that way no not not until they're much older you know I'm telling her when she's 18 but we'll see how long I can make it so I want to talk with you about like this word pop and I want to talk with you about your career I mean this is what your fourth or fifth book fifth book okay yeah and you have your editors sort of pushing you to write something that addresses what Iranian identity and girlhood slash womanhood or something like that and there is something about the influence of Louisa Mayelcott and little women that struck me when I was reading up and I think you said little women was always a book that I couldn't stand I realized though in my research that Louisa Mayelcott also didn't enjoy working on it so that made me more interesting or interested and I I want to talk about this because I think Louisa Mayelcott was being pressured to write a bestseller something like that right right something that's going to have wider appeal I could see Terangelis having wider appeal like from the packaging to the contents like the whole thing feels like it has a chance to be popular there's a 50,000 copy first print run which is not the norm I mean there there's like a higher print run for this book then maybe your previous books correct I think so I never know the number I saw that in print somewhere but I never focus on that or I never know what normal print run is so hard so I was told of people texted me and I was like I have no idea but I know I know that this is my first book that they also put under the category women's fiction as well as literary fiction so I think there was this interest in like trying to get a wider audience for this book okay so my question for you because we all got to live right and publishing is notoriously hard it's a it's a tough nut to crack right to make a living and we are in the same general age range what I'm wondering is how much of the pop in this work of literary pop satire was really conscious and intentional like okay motherfuckers I'm gonna try to write a popular novel like was that on your mind as you wrote this or was it something that sort of was more incidental it's such it's such a good question because I do think about it like a lot with a lot of other writers too and nobody's ever asked me I love this question actually so you know honestly let if I could just I feel like it's not narcissistic but I go walk through some of my other books like if I think about the first book right because of all the press I got I assumed that it would be it would have sold a lot more copies like it was I did you know the Kurt Anderson show on public radio you know it got a full Sunday New York Times book review but Judy Biden it's you know for me rock star in the literary world you know I was so excited you know it got so many so much so I wish like in my head I was like this this got I mean a lot of copies sold and then I realized years later when I actually asked about the numbers oh it didn't sell a lot it's still in print because I think people put it on syllabuses you know and they teach it and there's been so great certations and things like that on it's really nice I think the paper racks a little bit more my second novel had pretty pitiful sales and I had an editor that that was a whole other story I had some really big problems with the team in the US on that because there was some sexual harassment components and other things that were happening that were really harrowing so that book's life got truncated sadly and I also thought that was on a lot of lists on BuzzFeed lists and things like that like that's gonna sell right not really it has a great band base you know people do love it they bring it up well that's great but that didn't sell a lot and then to my absolute surprise I shouldn't have been surprised I should have been more savvy I mean I'm not a good sales person I'm not a good business person or I wouldn't constantly be a broke person freaked out about paying rent but but my third book six sold more than all my other books combined you know it sales were really good and if you had made that in the first week it would have definitely been a bestseller but I was also very ill during the promotion of it and I was being pushed to do tons of events and I was having literally like like breakdowns during the reading where I was end up on a stretcher in a hospital like and by breakdown I don't mean like a mental breakdown although that probably too but but physical breakdown you know I was very ill I couldn't finish the book tour so it was very hard for me to promote and that book did so well and I was shocked because why why why do you think it did so well I'm actually I really am shocked because I didn't think of Lyme disease for instance as being something that has universal interest but I guess it was you know illness and addiction and to book with my face on the cover people like faces on covers I don't know it it it had such a big audience I still get emails almost every week about that book I do events around that book I mean it's just huge and I felt like the writing was the weakest in that book I had written the final draft of that while I'd had a concussion I was literally at NYU concussion center with the stibular physical and neuropsychiatric therapy three times a week and and I was breaking their rules they said don't look at screens and I was just writing all the time desperately trying to make my editors or Harper Collins happy so I could deliver it on time I had lost several editors and several publicists by the time it came out like it was so I I do think that the early pandemic helped because books on chronic illness and disability had more interest because suddenly all Americans if they weren't chronically ill themselves someone in their world was right there was more awareness of it you know health problems I had like POTS slash dishononomia that sound really obscure suddenly lots of people knew bad because that became a long covid health issue you know so that that could be why the sales went up quite a bit I was I was doing a lot of events via zoom for sick years after it came out I came out in 2018 so I do wonder about that but I wasn't prepared for that book to do as well as it did and then you know I had this essay collection it had the worst pub date you can imagine may 2020 if we could say this the start of the pandemic who really knows but like March 2020 was like the big month right in the May 20th and we had so many supply what they called it supply chain issues things like worrying about the printing all that I mean we were really worried the publishers could even print that book and I'm not going off double day you know that was vintage and you know normally that's a pretty smooth machine and so everybody was panicked and I had had this great book tour plan to go around the country and then suddenly I'm doing a zoom events I didn't even know what zoom was at that point so I done skied events before but not zoom so I had no idea but but it was just that book didn't really sell well either and I think that had a lot to do with the time it came out it got all pre pub star reviews you know it's still being taught I'm still doing events on that but then this book so I don't I didn't do it in a calculated way thinking it's going to make money because it wasn't away my second book right and it was a response to these editors but but not my editors by the way not the editors I ended up with but these other editors that are floating around still some are not even in the industry anymore but but it it I don't think I I don't know if I'm ever going to know what's going to sell well in America I'm always surprised I look at the bestseller list some of them I understand some of like I'm like whoa okay whoa I don't I don't get it but it it's I certainly don't think there's there's anything wrong with with survival you know and selling well I don't even know what you know I feel weird about it always because I don't I am I have so much ick around capitalism and rich people and I'm sort of freaked out by all that stuff as a person but I certainly would love to survive and I have been bad at it my whole life and I'm still always my finances are always in shambles so that with the one thing I've thought about this book and some of the sequels and in my head I thought it could be really great for a film or TV and luckily like I was going to ask last yeah last year I feel a wonderful film TV agent Sylvia Raveno at WME who does a lot of film to TV STEM approached us and she's been you know representing it I've been going on lots of great meetings that's happened exactly yet there's been some really promising interest and stuff that that really encouraged me I do these these great meetings with these producers who are really well known at pretty big places and and I normally thought oh these people are gonna hate me I'm just gonna see tacky like I'm gonna order too much food at lunch because I'm for you know like I'm gonna say all the wrong things like no one's telling me what to say help you know but they were so nice and they loved the book so much and their vision for it seemed so healthy and and and they were some of the the first like I had my own readers but they are some of the early readers people that that I don't know that read the book and and their response was so great that I thought oh that could be great so I don't know I don't know what it would be like to survive in this country well like my parents really struggled with it there's relatives we have that have been really great with them but we're estranged from a lot of it and so I really don't know I it's such a strange world I've become used to working like four or five jobs like even on this book tour I'm a manuscript console to my off hours and I'm always working doing so much that I don't know what it would feel like to wake up one morning and have like a healthy bank account and live in a house I bought and like and have security I've never had it and I hope I've recently had some panics about it because I thought okay I'm 46 and what is it gonna look like in the like last like third or fourth of my life I don't really know I I always thought that these illnesses would get me and and that you know I probably you know in my 30s when I started getting really sick or even late 20s I started to realize I can't afford the illness that I have Lyme disease and it's sort of world of of all the other illnesses you can get from it we're just too hard to treat and too expensive to treat so you know one of my old editors Cal Morgan I remember having a really long conversation with him at one point right it was I was thinking very seriously about these programs of like assisted suicide programs and I was talking to him very calmly and rationally about it thinking like okay like this is something that gives me comfort because I don't want to keep being a burden on people in my community and and myself and I don't I don't really you know I'm sorry I'm being really emotional because I remember this this this meeting with him really well and he was I mean he was acquiring editor on sick and then he had left in Riverhead and now he's not there but he's still a dear dear friend he was very encouraging and and he just told me that's not an option we're not letting you have that option like you you've got to stick with it and he really believed in this book and I had a bunch of friends who really believed in my work and still believe in it and believe in my survival so they give me a lot of courage but I've had a lot of really bad car accidents I've had a lot of illness I've had a even last night I was telling you I had this terrible airplane mechanical failure on the way here to my LA book tour you know and I thought okay well this is gonna be it you know so I I just because I don't have my own kids and I'm not married I don't have the sense of like oh I have to stay alive for me I've had a dog so I think I could stay alive for my dogs that's that's pretty much it but I always have like godparents for them in my head too so I don't know I hope that's that sounds like such a sad answer but I haven't worked it out yet really I feel like I'm still figuring that part out of like what does it mean to survive in America a big part of me wishes that I could go back to Iran you know Persian was my first language and I'm in touch with a lot of Iranians there our government there is an absolute disaster and there would be no way to go there at this moment you know it's it's very horrific but when I think about like growing old you know as a writer I think I'll put out maybe ten books I have probably ten I've finished book six and book seven and I'm thinking about book eight maybe I have ten books in me and then I'd love to be like an old lady who goes to Iran and maybe lives in the village my grandmother lived in and has like a garden and and maybe just a modest job tutoring or something I don't know but I think I would have to transition out of this dream world I'm in and my dream world like by that I mean as a child I was dreamed of being an author an American author and I have diary entries and all sorts of things like I turned in an elementary school when I was actually practicing writing novels that said like one day I will be an author I even said my first book will come out before I'm 30 it came out a few months before I turned 30 I have this I will live in New York City I will write for the New York Times you know all these things I wanted to happen and so I'm living the dream of this little me so I I feel really satisfied there's only a few other literary goals I have you know I've been in the website New York or I'd love to be the print New York one day I would I would love to make people happy with a book that sells well a national bestseller would be great I don't think I'd never get a New York Times bestseller but you know I don't know I'd like people I'd like to just get more publishing contracts that's my my dream just enough so my editors will be happy my agent will be happy so I could have people just give me this gift for a few more books and then I could be like okay I can leave now yeah he's out yeah yeah yeah gonna go ten to my garden yeah so you said you have the next book done and then you also have alluded to possible sequels to tarantulas yes yes so so the next book I have a short story collection of short stories that I've worked on since 2002 and a bunch of them have been published and some haven't and so there's a short story collection that I think will be my next book that's still something we have to sell so we'll see and then I've worked on a dog memoir which Cosmo RIP yeah the love of my life last time we interviewed for your podcast Cosmo was still alive and he just died in February at age 11 very suddenly of a stroke as I've still grieving him and I and then I just got another dog last month I rescued a dog worst time ever but you know he's a delightful completely bananas little puppy of a mini golden doodle we think we're not sure maybe a mini poodle so so I'm a big dog lady so I had a lot of dog insights in me so I finished a draft of that as a residency and then and then the sequels I could even you know I know what the next book is and I know what a third book would be so it could be a trilogy but I've asked my agents editors I'm like how much do you have to sell to to war it like like to justify having you know sequels I don't really know what the answer to that would be you know Kevin with Crazy Rich Asians you know he sold so much and made complete sense to have more books but you know if that doesn't happen maybe I could and if a TV thing does happen one day I could put those ideas into that form or or even smish them into like a feature film I don't know but I just I'm really attached to the next book if it could happen I've written a hundred pages of it but I have the whole plot huh well good for you and it's a real time thing again it's another real time project because this time it takes place during woman life freedom and and all the way into this current moment and we're talking about the daughters trying to grapple with being activists and you can imagine how that would go for some of them not well but but but there's a lot in there that I want to explore and I feel that so the so they've won me over I started this book thinking I don't know about these girls I don't know about this project and and now it has me hooked a little bit so I want to to finish that arc and I think this book is just the beginning all right well congratulations to you you're very industrious for somebody who's had so many different different health struggles and I think that's the thing about the chronically ill disabled communities that sometimes people don't realize it's like when we're doing well you know we become very invested in working hard and we love it and and sometimes we do it so much that then we get sick again you know it's this huge challenge to figure out the balance when you have these things like how much you rest how much you not but I every time I'm doing well I'm just like okay let's go because this was a love in my life I started writing like seriously like when I was four I knew I wanted to be an author so I had a very strict schedule on the weekends when I didn't have school or in the summers I'm like reading and writing and and yeah I still still it's still my that my top like love you know let's let's write if we can you know well well it's been fun talking with you I'm glad we got a chance to catch up I wish you well on the books and I wish you well with your health thank you so much Brad you're the best thank you okay everybody there we have it that was my conversation with poor cheese to hot poor her new novel is called tarantulas it is available from pantheon you can find out more on the internet at poor cheese to hot poor calm follow her on Twitter Instagram tiktok I believe Facebook she's all over the place once again the new novel is called tarantulas it is available from pantheon go get your copy immediately and don't forget to subscribe to this show hit the subscribe button wherever you listen you can also subscribe on YouTube follow me on social media tiktok Instagram Twitter and blue sky you can sign up for my weekly email newsletter over at bradlistie.substack.com and join the other people patreon community over at patreon.com/otherpplpod help keep this show going into the future if you want to do me a quick favor please give this show a rating wherever you listen rate it review it it helps the show in the rankings in the algorithm it helps it find new listeners if you want to get another people t-shirt or join my monthly book club you can do that at the shows official website other ppl.com and if you want to read my latest book it's a novel called be brief and tell them everything available in trade paperback ebook and audiobook editions I narrate the audiobook so check it out if you so desire again it is a novel called be brief and tell them everything all right so that is it for the week it's a holiday week it's the fourth of july kind of a weird fourth if you ask me right weird but here we are I'm going to take a few days off I'll be back with more episodes and more podcast fun next week all right enjoy yourselves be safe and stay tuned [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
