The Book Maven: A Literary Revue

Bethanne Patrick
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A weekly podcast hosted by award-winning host and producer Bethanne Patrick, including themed book recommendations, interviews with great authors, and literary sizzle. thebookmavenunbound.substack.com

  1. 08/12/2025

    Mystery and Identity: Exploring 'The Last Ferry Out' with Andrea Bartz

    Season 3 of the Book Maven continues! This episode, Bethanne talks to Andrea Bartz, author of The Last Ferry Out, to discuss the influence of Andrea's Hungarian roots on the protagonist's heritage. Andrea shares insights on capturing complex LGBTQIA relationships authentically within thriller novels and reflects on the unique dynamics of immigrant families and the pressures faced by first-generation Americans. Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads. The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, and produced by Jordan Aaron and Lauren Stack. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thebookmavenunbound.substack.com

    18 min

  2. 07/22/2025

    Plotters and Pantsers with Jennifer Haigh

    Welcome to season 3 of the Book Maven! This episode, Bethanne talks to Jennifer Haigh, author of Rabbit Moon, to discuss her approach to her writing practice. Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads. The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, and produced by Jordan Aaron and Lauren Stack. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thebookmavenunbound.substack.com

    17 min

  3. 04/18/2025

    How To Write About Sex with Carmen Maria Machado

    We’ve made it to the end of season two! To close things out, Bethanne sits down with Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House, to discuss how she got into writing erotica, the politics of writing about sex, and navigating creative work in a repressive environment. Join us in conversation as Carmen talks about her first forays into writing. Bethanne puts the spotlight on Middlemarch in this week’s Canon or Can It. Will the classic novel survive Bethanne’s critical scrutiny? Tune in to find out. Can Bethanne beat the clock? She gives us 6 Recs for our To Be Read lists. Titles include: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett, Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride, Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, and Autumn by Ali Smith. Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads. The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack. All titles mentioned: In the Dream House – Carmen Maria Machado Flowers in the Attic – V.C. Andrews To the Finland Station – Edmund Wilson F**k: An Irreverent History of the F-Word – Rufus Lodge Orbital – Samantha Harvey Middlemarch – George Eliot House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski Imagine Me Gone – Adam Haslett Dept. of Speculation – Jenny Offill A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing – Eimear McBride Lincoln in the Bardo – George Saunders Autumn – Ali Smith Episode Transcript: Bethanne: Welcome to season two of the Book Maven: A Literary Revue. And as you might be able to tell today, I the Book Maven, Bethanne, have allergies. And so my voice has dropped about an octave. Thank you, dear listeners, for putting up with it. I promise we have a really great show. As you know, this season we're talking to leading authors, digging into the classics to decide which ones should stay in the literary cannon, and I'm also recommending some of my favorite books to you. We'll have all of that and more in this episode. And first this week I talked to Carmen Maria Machado, author of In The Dream House, and we talked about how she got into writing erotica, the politics of writing about sex and navigating creative work in a repressive environment. Join us in conversation as Carmen talks about her first forays into writing. I'm wondering, the first time you wrote a sex scene, was it for a short story? Was it an essay? And knowing yourself and knowing your process and your style, did you have any trepidation about it? Carmen: If we want to be really technical, the first time I ever wrote a sex scene, it was when I was probably about 11 or 12 and I That sounds about right. Yeah. I went through this phase where I wanted to write out dirty sentences, but I didn't know how to do it. So I would be on my family computer and I would write the dirtiest sentence I could think of, which when I wasn't very dirty, I didn't know very much, but I was trying to marshal everything I knew and I would write these sort of sentences and then I got fined it that I would delete the sentence, I would write a different nonsense sentence and then I would save the document multiple times and then I would go and check and double check and make sure there was this other sentence. So I feel like kind of an origin story. I mean, I also was reading, I read a lot of different sort of things when I was young, but I was reading VC Andrew, so when I was too young to be reading VC Andrews, so I feel like I also had encountered sex scenes. That's like an early text for so many of us. Totally. Yeah. I had encountered flowers in the attic and other books in those series and read them and not quite know what to make of it, but it was intriguing and titillating in its own weird way. I think that I was just in this place where I wanted to see what it felt like to do it myself. And then I feel like fast forward to my writing career and my life. Before I even got into grad school, I was writing on my own, I was writing erotica and it was just like a private, or not private because I was actually submitting it to things, but I was like, oh, I wonder if I could try this and see. And I was pretty good at it. I really liked it. And then I remember this other kind of interesting moment. I was in my second semester at Iowa as a grad student and I was a runner up in this erotica contest for this magazine that was like a short-lived erotica magazine for women, for straight women. So essentially I was a runner up for this contest and they were like, okay, we're going to put it in a magazine. Do you want to put it under your name or under a pen name? And that semester I was taking a class with Alex Chee and I knew that Alex Chee had published erotica because it had said so in his bio. And so I met up with Alex and I asked him, and we had this long conversation about using a pen name. So I published that story and a couple other stories in various anthologies and stuff under the pen name Olivia Glass, which is my grandmother's first name. And well, initially it was going to be Miranda, but Miranda Glass was like a cellist or something. I didn't want to mess up her Google results. So I did Olivia Glass and, and then at some point during grad school I was like writing about sex and I just want to fold this all into my practice. I just want to make it all kind of one thing. And so I started submitting work that had more explicit sexual content and I never looked back. I feel like it, it felt so correct when I was doing it. I take sex very seriously and I have a lot of thoughts about it and it's a very important part of my life, and this is true for many people. And I was like, I just so rarely read sex scenes in the perspective of people who are like me. I want to move ahead with that, but I Bethanne: Also want to go back to filament for a second because you were submitting something under this pseudonym to a magazine for straight women. Was it because they had a contest? Was it because you weren't finding magazines that took the kind of writing you were doing for queer women? Or tell me a little bit more about that. Carmen: I'm bisexual. Before I went to grad school, I primarily dated men. That was just as the arc of so many queer women go. It was like doing that until I realized, oh, wait. But yeah, I think I was intrigued by the idea, I mean the idea of a magazine centering any women's erotic desires, even straight women. Bethanne: That's what I was getting to. Carmen: That itself is still kind of revolutionary. Obviously I would've been also happy to write for a queer magazine, but the fact was there was just this magazine that had some funding. I mean, it didn't pay a lot, but it paid some money. And it's like how I also really love Magic Mike XXL. I mean it's a very straight, but also it's so much about women's pleasure that I don't mind that it has more of this sort of straight energy because of interested in something that I'm really interested in, which is women's sexuality and the way that women approach sex. Bethanne: What was the moment when you wrote something and you write about sex, like you say all the time now when you thought I've gotten there, I have put a woman right where she's supposed to be. Did you have a moment like that? Carmen: I don't know if it was one singular moment. I mean, I think with my first book I had that story inventory, which was this list of sexual partners. That was a story that I wrote purely out of spite because I had been in a workshop where I had criticized a male classmates' sexual, but I thought sexist story, and he interpreted that as me being a weird prude who didn't like writing about sex. And I was so annoyed. That was his takeaway that I went and just wrotethe story. I was like, I'm going to write a story where every scene is a sex scene. But then of course I had to figure out, well, it can't just be that. What is the other thing happening behind it? And then eventually I figured it out and as I wrote the story, I was like, oh yeah, this is really good. But I remember it feeling like there was a character who was at a loose end and trying to figure out what she wants and what she needs in this very apocalyptic moment. And I think for me, it felt so similar to how I think I've approached being alive, which is, yeah, what does it mean to be in a body in certain ways here? What feels like the end or something close to the end? I think that was a story that really just, yeah, it felt like a moment of kind of a revelation. Bethanne: I think a lot of us feel closer to the end than ever, and yet here we are in these bodies and these bodies still want sex. These bodies still desire things. As you said, sex is something that's very important to you, and I don't think you just mean intellectually either. And so we have this and how do we approach the fact that we have needs and desires and all kinds of different ways that we want to look at them, assuage them, and interact with other people about them? Is there going to be an anthology, not necessarily from you about, I don't know, sex at the end of the world? How do we approach this? It's a huge question, I know. Carmen: I think it's not even so specific as that. I also think that we are actually in a very anti-sex moment. We are in a very sex negative in the United States. The US has always been a very puritanical culture, even just compared to Europe for example. I think that we are also in this historical moment where sex is suspicious, literally. Obviously, we're also in this moment of queer policies, anti-trans policies, anti-abortion stuff, and people talking about getting rid of no-fault divorce, and all these really just unhinged. And it's like you boil it down and it's essentially queer bodies or women's bodies being out of control of the state essentially. And I think that's true culturally. It's funny, like they'll do surveys where peop

    27 min

  4. 04/11/2025

    Reclaiming Our Dreams with Laila Lalami

    Two more episodes to go in season two! For this one, Bethanne sits down with Laila Lalami to discuss the impact of technology on identity and how we are catering ourselves towards algorithms, the role of community in freedom, and the relationship between privacy, dreams, and personal integrity. You can buy The Dream Hotel wherever books are sold. George Orwell makes another appearance on the TBM podcast, this time with his novel 1984. Will Bethanne let another Orwell book live in the canon, or will she kick this ‘mother of dystopian novels’ out for good? Can Bethanne beat the clock? She gives us 6 Recs for our To Be Read lists, this week focusing on feminist dystopian classics. Titles include: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, The Power by Naomi Alderman, Severance by Ling Ma, Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch, The City We Became N.K. Jesmisin, and Afterland by Lauren Beukes. Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads. The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack. All titles mentioned: The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami, Show Don’t Tell: Stories by Curtis Sittenfeld, Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me: A Memoir by Deirdre Bair, The Chosen and the Beautiful by Ngih Vo 1984 by George Orwell, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, The Power by Naomi Alderman, Severance by Ling Ma, Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch, The City We Became N.K. Jemisin, and Afterland by Lauren Beukes. Transcript Bethanne: Welcome to season two of The Book Maven: a Literary Revue. This season, we'll talk to leading authors, dig into the classics to decide which should stay in the literary canon, and recommend some of my favorite books to you. We'll have all that and more in this episode, but this week, I talked to Laila Lalami about her latest novel, the Dream Hotel. We discussed the role of community in freedom, the impact of technology on identity, and the relationship between dreams, privacy, and personal integrity. Join us in conversation as Laila discusses her exploration of immigration and dystopia in The Dream Hotel. I don't think that people understand how much immigration is based on. Selection and eugenics and things like that. And so, in the Dream Hotel, I found so much that spoke to the immigrant experience. How does that resonate with you, especially because you've written before about the immigrant experience and what it is like for people to come to this country specifically? Laila: Yeah, this is a fascinating question. When I set out to write a book, it was. I started working on it 10 years ago, and it was a book that came to me as a question, like, what if we keep going like this? And data collection continues to be more and more. Precise, granular, and invasive, the next step is our interior lives. What would happen if we lose privacy in our dreams? It was just a question, and that was what the book started as for me in the form of a question. Then I set that aside and ended up writing The Other Americans. I picked up the manuscript again in 2020 and finished it last year. Interestingly, this idea of estrangement was that our relationship with technology almost encourages an estrangement from the self. Where we start obeying these extremely arbitrary rules about how we present ourselves in public. So, for example, you might take a picture of yourself instead of a photo. This way, you might angle the camera at 45-degree angles because that's more flattering. Whatever flattering means, you might post it between this hour and that hour because that's when you'll get the most views. You might answer your comments this way because that's what will get the most engagement. We are training ourselves to behave in ways that satisfy these algorithms. But in the process of doing that, we estrange ourselves from our instincts, our beliefs, and our morals. From our sense of what is correct and estrangement from the self, we have these different selves, the cells we present to the public, and all that. First of all, it is a feeling that is universal and deeply human. But I think what happens in immigration is that you move from one country to the next, you have to build a new identity. Sometimes, that process might involve taking on new names and all of that. So yes, I can see a connection; indeed, the book can be read as a dystopia. You can read it as a reflection of the past and that experience. Bethanne: I was thinking very specifically at first about the experience of immigration as a kind of fragmentation in the sense that you're talking about because when you do go to a different country to live as opposed to simply visiting with a visa and a passport, you have to break your identity down into all of these documents. Sarah, of course, has her identity broken down in slightly different ways because of the digital and invasive nature. And Layla, what you were talking about is speaking to the idea that we want to give away all the things that make up an individual? And if we do choose to give some of it away, how do we understand that? So I guess in the case of Sarah, who is already being held in this detention center when we meet her, that's not giving anything away. We know that she was living a, you know, new mom of twins, she's married, she's living a very everyday life, and it turns out that because of some things in her dreams. She can be detained and told, look, we don't want you to do anything terrible, so we're gonna hold you until we're sure you won't. It's a wild, wild idea, and it's also an idea that came from the question you asked. When did you know? That this is where Sarah was. When did you know that she was in this place? Laila: Yeah, remember I said earlier that I started working on the book in 2014? So initially, my idea had been, okay, I'm gonna imagine a future in which dreams are no longer private. How would I get there if I were to imagine this world? Immediately, I had the idea of a device that would help you sleep because of most of the technology that we use. It has become a part of our lives because of its convenience. So if I can create a device that helps me sleep, especially since I'm an insomniac, and I would be like, yes, I'll sign up. I'll get this device. If you can guarantee me nine hours of sleep, sign me up. I will do anything, right? And, of course, the fine, that's the device. Then I started working on how the novel started, which began in this tech company. But after I wrote a couple of chapters, I just. I couldn't stay in the tech company. I couldn't make myself and use my imaginative powers to remain inside the tech company for 400 pages. I just didn't. I worked at a tech company long before I wrote my first book, so I knew about the culture and what goes on there. But I didn't have fun with it and didn't want to stay in it. So, I set the book aside and decided to work on this other manuscript that I had also. But when I returned to it in 2020, I thought, "Wait a minute." If I were to use this device, the idea for the book would be that it's liberalizing the fact that we are losing our freedoms. Your dreams are deeply intimate. No one else shares them with you. You can be as close as you want with another human being. Say, for example, your partner, and you can share many of your thoughts and feelings, your petty jealousies, and the less savory aspects of yourself with that person who loves you and doesn't judge you. You can have all that, but that doesn't mean they can share this part of you. That part of you is yours. It is intimate. It belongs only to you and to me. It starts getting into these ideas of personal integrity, like basically the fact that you own your body, you own your mind, it is yours. You think about it; everything inside it belongs to you. It's a human right. If we keep having this data being collected about us, and let's say that in the world of the novel, I have literalized a debt loss of privacy, to the extent that you know your dreams can be seen by these tech companies. Let's say I've literalized it, then. What would be the next logical step? How can I make that idea come out more? Since this is all about the loss of freedom, I will put this character in a semi-carceral, confined environment. So think asylum, think psychiatric hospital, think leprosarium. All of these areas that you think of as being locked, Ward. Yes. Yes. Yeah, exactly. They're little mini societies, and I will put my character in there to literalize that idea and then see what happens next. Bethanne: Do you know what I think is hilarious about this? And there's not much hilarious about it on the page, but I. What is more boring than hearing someone else talk about their dreams? Layla? Yes. Yes. Laila: But not in this Bethanne: book, I don't think. I hope not. Not in this book. Not in this book. And here's the thing. This is what is so essential about the privacy you're talking about, to each of us. Our dreams are exciting because of all the parts of us that make up those dreams, and there is no one in our life saved, perhaps for a parent. Who has all of that except us? And then, of course, the fact is that we start as children and become adults. So even parents don't have access to everything in our lives, but our dreams have that access. Laila: Power is most successful when it has been internalized. If we look at it, then we are surveilling ourselves. My fear with technology is that we are in the early stages of that, where we are internalizing, oh, I have to post at this hour. I have to have this many followers, and I, you know, have to do this, and I have to behave in specific ways online. I agree to the terms of service, and my phone has to know how many steps I take every day, and it tracks me from this. We accept all this. And where are we headed with that? Are we bringing yet another form of control into our lives, and we have begu

    30 min
  5. Fiction Makes Us Kinder with Chris Bohjalian

    04/04/2025

    Fiction Makes Us Kinder with Chris Bohjalian

    The Book Maven is back with another important conversation about finding empathy in our writing. In this episode, Bethanne Patrick talks to Chris Bohjalian about his newest novel The Jackal’s Mistress. They discuss recounting difficult historic events, finding empathy through fiction, and the process of researching information for this book. Canon or Can It returns this week, focusing on Gone With the Wind, which lives in infamy for its portrayal of American chattel slavery as secondary to its romantic narrative. Can Bethanne beat the clock? She gives us 6 Recs for our To Be Read lists, this week focusing on books with phenomenal TV adaptations. Titles include: Restoration by Rose Tremain, The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri, Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan, In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner, Savage Coast by Muriel Rukeyser, and Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads. The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack. All titles mentioned: The Jackal's Mistress, Skeletons at the Feast, Secrets of Eden, Tran-sister Radio: A Transgender Love Story, Midwives, The Flight Attendant, and The Amateur by Chris Bohjalian Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier The Vermont Brigade in the Shenandoah Valley by Aldace Walker This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust The Heart of American Poetry and Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie Nighttime is My Time by Mary Higgins Clark Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell The Unvanquished by William Faulkner The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane Jubilee by Margaret Walker Restoration by Rose Tremain The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner Savage Coast by Muriel Rukeyser Half of a Yellow Sunby Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Episode Transcript: Welcome to season two of The Book Maven: A Literary Revue. This season, we'll talk to leading authors, dig into the classics to decide which should stay in the literary canon, and I'll recommend some of my favorite books to you. We'll have all that and more in this episode. But first… This week, I talked to Chris Bohjalian about his latest novel, The Jackal's Mistress. We discussed recounting difficult historical events, finding empathy through fiction, and the process of researching for this book. Join us now in conversation as Chris talks about The Jackal's Mistress as a uniquely American work of fiction. BP: Does it feel big, The Jackal's Mistress to you? CB: First of all, Bethanne, thank you. It's always great to chat with you. BP: Thank you. Likewise. CB: It's my 25th book. Now, the fact that it's my 25th book doesn't necessarily mean it is a big book. 25 books are only a testament to my longevity, not necessarily my talent. BP: But, you know, even if we were to take talent out of the equation, this book feels... it has the feel of relevance. It feels like a very American book. I'm not trying to say Great American Novel. Not at all. But it’s a very American book, and it’s a book for our time right now. CB: I hope so. The fact is there is a lot of Civil War literature. BP: There is. And yet, like World War II literature, it never seems to run out of relevance. There’s always a place for something that helps us see things in a different way. CB: And the thing I love about Civil War fiction versus Civil War history—and I love Civil War history too, make no mistake—is that Civil War fiction tends to focus on individuals. Women, men, you get up close and personal. Whether it’s the remarkable short stories of Ambrose Bierce, Cold Mountain (Charles Frazier), or Dolen Perkins-Valdez. When you write about individuals in the Civil War in fiction, I think you see the conflagration in ways you might not when you're watching the sweep of armies across Gettysburg or Georgia. BP: These people were real. And it’s not simply a bunch of facts. There’s writing about them. There are historical documents. It's a story that I wonder how it got lost like this. I mean, it was meant for you clearly—because how else did it get lost like this? CB: Yeah. All we know about the two principals, Henry Bedell, a lieutenant with the Vermont Brigade, and Betty Van Meter, who lived in the northern part of the Shenandoah Valley, 20 miles southwest of Harper’s Ferry in Berryville, all we really know about these two people begins with a Middlebury College valedictorian from the class of 1862 named Aldace Walker. Because attrition among officers was so high by 1864, this kid is a major in the Vermont Brigade, and before he turns 30, he writes his memoir, The Vermont Brigade in the Shenandoah Valley. About five or six pages in, he refers to what he calls “one anecdote.” The anecdote is the story of one of the lieutenants in the Vermont Brigade being left for dead and kept alive by a rebel woman who literally kept him alive, for lack of a better word—and this is not the word Walker used, of course, “karma.” She’s thinking, “If I can keep this horrific Yankee blue belly alive, maybe my husband will someday come home to me.” That’s fundamentally the true part of the story, and that’s really all we know. There are other less important but interesting footnotes. For example, in 1915, Betty Van Meter was given a citation by the Vermont legislature for keeping a son of Vermont alive in 1864. Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of War, the notoriously curmudgeonly Edwin Stanton, was so moved by her efforts that he tried to move heaven and earth to see if he could find her husband in the Union POW system. When I spoke to historians about this story, most of them had no idea because historians focus on the sweep of armies, or they focus on very specific, interesting macro changes in the country, such as Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering, which examines how 620,000 dead Americans dramatically changed our view of death, religion, the afterlife, and, of course, medicine. They’re not focused on Henry Bedell and Betty Van Meter in a farmhouse in the Shenandoah Valley doing this unbelievably dangerous thing because there’s Jule Early’s Confederate army. There’s John Mosby, who led his guerillas, and hanging Union officers. What Betty Van Meter did was treason. So, the few historians who’d heard of this anecdote knew very little about it, and they all asked me the same thing: What have you learned? Do you think they were lovers? BP: Oh, I’m banging my forehead. It matters not one whit. CB: No. What matters is the unbelievable humanity of this woman who makes this decision, for whatever reason. BP: I think people who write stories, who write novels, and who have developed great empathy and compassion in reading and writing—considering what stories can do for us—are going to have a role in standing up, not just in the face of whatever comes, but, and this is something that is relevant to The Jackel’s Mistresss, as you pointed out in the days afterward. Because those stories we have from the Civil War now, the testimony we have from someone like Aldis Walker and you point out in your afterword, he became a truly, truly gifted writer and lawyer. He was a really important person. This is the work we have to continue doing. And it isn’t always about history books with numbers and dates. It’s also about foregrounding the stories, as you said, about Betty/Libby and karma and kindness, and making sure people see those because there are already stories about cruelty and callousness, and that seems to be such an important part of it. To me, I don’t know if I’ve read all 25 of your books. CB: Oh, you don’t want to. Some of them are absolute train wrecks. I’m responsible for the single worst first novel ever published, bar none. BP: That’s an amazing achievement! You’ve given yourself, however, that award—well, I don’t know if it stands, Chris, but I will say I’ve read many, and I believe that Secrets of Eden – that was something that hit me when I read it: the compassion for the characters. And I wonder, where do you attribute this? Maybe you wrote a novel that wasn’t as good as a later one, but I’m looking at you, even though our audience won’t see the video. I am looking at your incredible bookshelves, which I’ve had the privilege of seeing on various Zooms and things before. Where does this deep compassion come from for you? Does it come from reading? Does it come from something else? Where does this deep compassion? We mentioned Luis Urrea earlier before we started recording, and he has always said, “Fill your pen with compassion, or don’t pick it up.” CB: Oh my God. His story, my God. The whole idea that a writer’s career begins with the murder of his father is just unbelievable to me. BP: Unbelievable. CB: So, where does the compassion come from? If I have compassion… you know, I view The Jackal's Mistress fundamentally as a Romeo and Juliet kind of love story about doomed lovers from opposite sides of the wall. But I grew up in a lot of places. At one point, I went to five schools in six years, in three states. I wasn’t an army kid… BP: Oh my goodness! CB: … we moved around. We moved around a lot. And so I was always that kid trying to figure out the mores and the culture. Scott Fitzgerald talks a lot about how writers are observant. You’re always that kid with your fingers pressed against the glass, from the outside looking inside at the party, wondering why you weren’t invited. I think that’s why I’m a writer: I had the great, weird blessing of moving around a lot. I always knew my parents loved me, but it’s only in the last 25 years that I’ve really begun to understand their demons as well as their angels. Maybe that’s where my characters come fr

    33 min

  6. 03/28/2025

    Staying Hungry with Min Jin Lee

    Let them eat cake! Or kale. Or cookies. Or whatever women are hungry for. In this episode, Bethanne Patrick sits down with highly educated and highly respected author Min Jin Lee to discuss hunger, most specifically women’s hunger, and how radical it is for women to loudly voice ‘I’M HUNGRY’. Min’s hit novel Pachinko has been turned into a renowned drama series on Apple TV. We’re back with a Pop! Goes The Culture this week, focusing on The Color Purple by Alice Walker. Bethanne decides to do something different this week and focus not only on the book, but on Alice Walker’s cultural impact as well. Can Bethanne beat the clock? She gives us 6 Recs for our To Be Read lists, this week focusing on books with phenomenal TV adaptations. Titles include: Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn, Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman, The Little Drummer Girl by John Le Carré, Patrick Melrose (series) by Edward St. Aubyn, and The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis. Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads. The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack. All titles mentioned: Pachinko and Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee, Authority by Andrea Long Chu, Towards Zero by Agatha Christie, The Thinking Heart by David Grossman, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn, Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman, The Little Drummer Girl by John Le Carré, Patrick Melrose (series) by Edward St. Aubyn, and The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis. Episode Transcript Welcome to Season Two of The Book Maven: A Literary Revue. This season, we’ll talk to leading authors, dive into the classics to decide which should stay in the literary canon, and I’ll recommend some of my favorite books to you. We’ll have all of that and more in this episode. But first, this week, I talked to Min Jin Lee about hunger. We discuss consuming knowledge, relishing experiences, and the radical nature of a smart and hungry woman. Join us now in conversation as Min talks about the importance of food in her writing. BP: I know Pachinko, for example, well Free Food for Millionaires as well—there’s so much about food in your writing. So, I wanted to talk about how you learned to write about food. You certainly weren't a food writer or a food journalist when you began writing fiction. Were there challenges in that? Was it something that came very naturally to you? MJL: That's so interesting. I don’t even think about my food writing at all. I have actually done some food writing. I’ve written for Travel and Leisure and S Traveler and Food and Wine. I’ve written little essays and pieces, but…You know what? MFK Fisher, who is the great OG food writer, was asked why she writes about food, and her answer was: "No, I write about hunger." Isn’t that good? Isn’t that the best? It’s so good—it gets right to the heart of things. And I definitely feel like a hungry person sometimes. There are so many things I want to be nourished with, and whenever I do feel nourished by something or someone, or by a moment, I do feel joy. Because I don’t expect happiness in life at all. At all. As a matter of fact, I’m a little bit of a Grinch. BP: There's the headline. MJL: Min Jin Lee is a Grinch! So whenever I’m talking to young people and they say things like, “Oh, that job doesn’t make me happy,” or “That situation makes me really unhappy,” or “I’m really traumatized about something,” I just think, “That sounds fine.” I don’t even get troubled by it. I always kind of think, “Yeah, that’s life, pal.” I usually say something that sounds really tough, but I always say, “Seeking happiness is very sheep-like behavior. We get into a lot of trouble looking for happiness. I don’t think it’s something you go looking for. It comes to you now and then.” BP: Happiness is definitely not something you get to have all the time. I completely agree with you, but I want to go back to something you said a minute ago about being a very hungry person. MJL: Yeah, I’m hungry. BP: What does that mean? Since you know you can’t be happy all the time, what does hunger mean? Because hunger doesn’t mean you’re always going to be satisfied, does it? MJL: But I really respect my appetites. I respect my hunger, I respect my appetites. And if the world says that, especially women, that we’re not supposed to be hungry, for me to say that is actually a very threatening thing to the world. BP: It’s radical. It’s radical for women to say we are hungry, that we want more. Something I’ve talked about, and I think I wrote about it in my memoir, is growing up and how the biggest or best portion was always reserved for dad. Because in my family, like so many others, dad was the one who went out to work. So the women were always saying, “You don’t get that beautiful pork chop,” or “You don’t get the delicious crusty corner of the casserole because that’s for the man in the family.” And I’m not blaming my parents for that. That was the reality. But I definitely blame society for that—telling women, “Hold back. Hold back.” MJL: I recently… so you asked me about cooking and food writing, and I gave you the MFK Fisher quote because I think talking about food is, in many ways, a lovely and polite conversation. But the root of everything for me is that I have this enormous appetite. And I’ve been made to feel ashamed for having it for most of my life. It’s exactly what you said about dad getting the beautiful pork chop, or how we have to save the best for the men. In Korea, that thinking lasted for a very long time—men get to eat first, the sons eat with the men, but the daughters are in the kitchen. And I think there’s something wrong with me or right with me… I want to eat. And if you make me feel ashamed of it, you’re telling me I shouldn’t be human. That I shouldn’t have energy. That I shouldn’t keep going. This is my right. I have a right to my appetite. I feel like that is as much of a feminist gesture as anything else. BP: You know, this is incredible to me that you said that, Min, because… at some point last year, my doctor wanted me to take one of these semaglutide injections—just like every woman I know seems to be on one of these. So I tried it, but I stopped. She asked why I stopped, and I said, “Well, I had absolutely no appetite at all.” And she said, “Well, that’s good. We want to get your weight down.” But I said, “No, having no appetite made me feel less than human. I didn’t feel like a human being.” And the doctor—oh, she clearly didn’t understand. She’s a very thin, health-conscious person, great, certainly not at all someone with disordered eating, but she couldn’t understand that someone with more weight on their body would rather feel human than feel no appetite. That really shocked me. MJL: I really respect you saying that. I understand that a lot of people are taking semaglutides, and everyone has a personal journey with their weight and health. But what I really love about what you said, as a metaphor and also as an allegory for our lives, is that our hungers, our appetites, our weight… Even the word “weight,” right? The word “glory” is actually another way of saying “weight” or “significance.” Are you expecting me to give my glory and my weight and my significance and my gravitas away? And for what? BP: Say that again. MJL: What do I get in return if I gave away my glory? What do I get in return? Tell me what I get in return because, unfortunately for the world, I’ve been a very educated person. I’m a very well-read person. And I’m in good company. Sister, BP: Yes, you are a very well-educated, very well-read person. And the unfortunate thing for the world is that a well-read woman is a dangerous thing. MJL: A well-read woman… I mean, first of all, we’re well-read women and we’re writers. We might as well be anarchists. Yes, with really good manners. BP: You know, this is a good time for me to remind our audience that Min is also an attorney—and a really good one. So, you know, tell me what I get in return. As you said, you’re a great negotiator. And this is the thing—don’t ask me to give up. For instance, we’re talking about all these hungers, and hunger means so many different things. It’s not just about food. And hunger—when we recognize it, when we try to fulfill it, we don’t always fulfill it—but when we try to fulfill it, that is a radical act. MJL: Yeah. BP: Especially, as you said, for women to say, “You know, I’m just going to eat this entire package of cookies,” or “I feel like eating a bowl of kale,” when it’s what we want, instead of what someone else wants. And that’s the radical part of it because it doesn’t have to be about sweet things, soft things, or fattening things. It’s about determining what we truly want. And that is something we women, especially women… we were both born in the 20th century. Sometimes you hear a kid when you’re teaching refer to it as the 1900s, and I think, “What happened?!” But that is a radical act. As you said, Min. MJL: I love the allegory of hunger, appetite, nourishment, and food. And if I did want to eat a package of cookies—which I have done—and I’m not ashamed, you will not make me feel ashamed of wanting to have done that, and it’s because I wanted something else. Because there was no way that package of cookies gave me the nutritional value I needed. And I think just saying it all of a sudden makes me realize I don’t need to eat a package of cookies anymore. BP: Right. Right. MJL: Because what I really wanted wasn’t just the package. Maybe what I really wanted was something delightful, sweet, and almost

    33 min

  7. 03/14/2025

    Constructing Identities with SJ Sindu

    On this week’s episode Bethanne sits down with author S.J. Sindu to discuss gender queerness and the importance of defining such a term, especially in the political environment of today. SJ’s newest book, Tall Water will be released in August of 2025 by HarperCollins. Should Revolutionary Road be kicked to the curb? Or should Richard Yates’ book be able to live in the canon? Bethanne believes it is ‘a perfect novel’, but can she convince you listeners as well? Can Bethanne beat the clock? She gives us 6 Recs for our To Be Read lists. Titles include Devil is Fine by John Vercher, Self Made by Tara Isabella Burton, The Extinction of Experience by Christine Rosen, Orlando by Virginia Woolf, Fairest by Meredith Talusan, and Who's Afraid of Gender by Judith Butler. Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads. The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack. All titles mentioned: Tall Water by SJ Sindu, Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone, The Language of Remembering by Patrick Holloway, Assignment in Brittany by Helen MacInnes, The Invisible Woman by Erika Robuck, The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher, A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, The Night Watch by Sarah Waters, The Prettiest Star by Carter Sickels, Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo, Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Devil is Fine by John Vercher, Self Made by Tara Isabella Burton, The Extinction of Experience by Christine Rosen, Orlando by Virginia Woolf, Fairest by Meredith Talusan, Who's Afraid of Gender by Judith Butler, I Heard Her Call My Name by Lucy Sante. Transcript: Welcome to season two of The Book Maven, a literary review. This season, we'll talk to leading authors, dig into the classics to decide which should stay in the literary canon, and I'll recommend some of my favorite books to you. We'll have all that and more in this episode. But first! This week, I talked to SJ Sindu about their new book Tall Water. Join us as we talk about gender queerness and the importance of defining such a term. BP: So, did you grow up in Massachusetts, correct? SS: Partly. I partly grew up in Sri Lanka, then I moved to Massachusetts and moved around Massachusetts quite a bit. In high school, I ended up in South Dakota. Wow. Okay. So quite a range there. BP: That is quite a range. Oh my goodness. And let's leave everything else out of the equation. That would have been a culture shock. What part of Massachusetts were you in when you left? SS: When I left, I was in the suburbs of Boston. BP: Oh my goodness. I can't imagine how jarring that must have been. And, and this is getting us to more of the main subject I wanted to talk with you about. So you're a teenager. You're coming into consciousness of yourself as a human adult, as a sexual being, and also as someone who, besides sexuality and all the other things that go along with adolescence, you're also figuring out your identity. At what point did you realize that you were in the category that we loosely use the term genderqueer for? SS: It took a while. I think I started to kind of be exposed to alternative genders and sexualities in my high school in Waltham, Massachusetts and Winchester, Massachusetts. It was a very open, progressive leftist environment. I had classmates and friends who were in a throuple as freshmen in high school. And I had queer friends, so I was being exposed to it. That was around the time when I was a freshman when 9/11 happened. Everyone was in this environment of political growth. We were all being forced to become politically active in one way or another because it was our generation that was going to fight the Iraq war and the Afghani war. We were becoming really outward-facing to the world in a way that many teenagers don't do until they're older. BP: I think this is such an important point that because of those stresses on our society and culture, you had to say, okay, we're going to be who we really are. We are not going to necessarily fit into any specific boxes that you make. There are bigger things to be faced. SS: Yes. And I saw a lot of my friends become really politically active in the wake of 9/11. I wasn't. But then I moved to South Dakota. BP: Well, that, and that is the next, thereby hangs a tale. So, you moved to South Dakota and what was that like? I don’t want to assume anything because I immediately think of South Dakota and I think of the TV series Yellowstone. I think of people conforming and having this idea and that idea, but I could be wrong. Maybe there was a thriving queer community where you were in South Dakota. SS: I wouldn't say thriving. We definitely existed. This was Sioux Falls, South Dakota in 2002. It was very small, very conservative, very religious—religious as in very specifically, there were like three churches that people went to. There was a literal cornfield across the street from my high school. But it was still, sort of, a city. There was some diversity to be found. There were like five of us that were kind of questioning sexuality, questioning gender in our school. Gay marriage was legalized in Massachusetts after I left, and I was like, okay. In South Dakota, though, it became a hot-button issue in our school. There were physical fistfights about the issue of queerness. There were teachers who would yell at students if they held hands in the hallway if they were queer. There was no support to be found, so we had to support each other. At that point, I wasn't really concerned about me. I was more trying to be an ally because I wasn't dating. I wasn't allowed to date. I'm from a South Asian family, so I wasn't allowed to date. So for me, queerness really started with trying to help the community as an ally. And then when I went to college, I found a thriving group of queer people, a thriving queer community in Lincoln, Nebraska, of all places. And that's where I was like, oh, I don't think I'm straight. I don't think I'm cisgender. And within two years, my sophomore year of college, I had come out first as bisexual, then I started to use the word queer and then specifically as genderqueer. BP: As someone who's much older and doesn't feel I can take on the queer identification too easily or in a flippant way, I just want you to, do you alternate between the way you present? And I think that is important because that might also affect your fiction. SS: That's a great question. When I was younger, I definitely tried to present more masculine because I felt like, and it's not just my feeling, this was the general culture in the queer community that "real" androgynous people or "real" non-binary people dressed in an androgynous way. And if you didn’t dress more masculine, my genderqueerness wouldn't be believed. So for me, it has always been an internal thing, never an external thing. I love fashion, I love style, I love makeup and jewelry, and things that bling. Externally, I love all of those things. I love femme presentation and femme fashion, as well as butch presentation and butch fashion. I just love the way fashion and style can communicate important details about us, including gender. I’m fascinated by that on a scholarly level. But when I was younger, I felt like I had to participate in it so that people would accept that I was genderqueer. Now, the culture has completely changed, and it is a free-for-all, and I love it. When I tell young people that I’m genderqueer, and I may have red lipstick and a skirt on, they’re just like, "Okay, great," and they move on, and it’s wonderful. We've achieved that sort of freedom now. The only thing they ask me is why genderqueer and why not non-binary or agender or other non-binary labels. BP: Well, let's talk about that. That's exactly it because I think—and I'm going to say what I think just so we can see it's kind of like a game show—how close can Bethanne come to this? You know, I want to say, your thoughts about taking on what the community believed, taking on certain masculine kinds of hair, clothes, et cetera... You know, I went to Smith in the '80s and believe me, Birkenstocks were very political then. Now we all wear Birkenstocks, right? And it doesn't matter. But there was a sense of if you liked lipstick, if you liked earrings, you don't tell me you're a lesbian, being with that red lipstick on. I saw a lot of people go through that. I instead was given a pin that said “hopelessly heterosexual,” and yet, and this is why I'm so interested in what you're saying about the strides that have been made. I think of myself completely—my mind is so queer, right? And that it has nothing to do with my long-term cishet monogamous marriage. It has nothing to do with anything except how I feel about what you're saying: anything goes. And it's wonderful. One of my favorite celebrities in the world is Alan Cumming, and Alan Cumming can put on a full suit, put on a dress, put on a big brooch, do whatever he likes. So to me, that gives you this internal freedom that you can then put on the page. Am I getting closer to that? SS: Yes, I think for me, the fiction is definitely a big part of the genderqueerness. I don't know what it's like to feel like a gender. I never have. Internally, I don't know what people mean when they say that. It's fun for me to inhabit my characters. As a fiction writer, I need to be able to sink into characters regardless of gender. I love being able to write from the masculine perspective, from men's perspectives. I find that malleability in gender really fun to do in a creative way. And that's how it really bleeds into my fiction—being able to get into the heads of characters regardless of their gender. BP: One last thing about the term genderqueer. You were mentioning a little while ago abou

    35 min

  8. 03/07/2025

    Living in History with Lauren Francis-Sharma

    In this episode of the Book Maven: A Literary Revue, Bethanne Patrick sits down with Lauren Francis-Sharma to talk about the intense nature of covering hearings on apartheid practices in South Africa and translating those experiences to her new book Casualties of Truth. This week we put Albert Camus’s The Stranger to the test. In this installment of Canon or Can It?, we’ll discuss the French author’s writing style and philosophy and decide if it should live on as a canonical text, or be kicked to the curb forever. Can Bethanne beat the clock? She gives us 6 Recs for our To Be Read lists. Titles include: Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves by Adam Hochschild, Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts by Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martinez, The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America by Sarah Lewis, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah, You Will Be Safe Here by Damien Barr, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson. Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads. The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack. All titles mentioned: Casualties of Truth by Lauren Francis Sharma The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones Doll Seed by Michele Tracy Berger Consumed by Greg Buchanan After Death by Dean Koontz Real Tigers by Mick Herron Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves by Adam Hochschild Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts by Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martinez The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America by Sarah Lewis Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah You Will Be Safe Here by Damien Barr Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson The Stranger Albert Camus Full Episode Transcript Welcome to season two of The Book Maven: A Literary Revue. This season, we'll talk to leading authors, dig into the classics to decide which should stay in the literary canon, and I'll recommend some of my favorite books to you. We'll have all that and more in this episode, but first, this week, Lauren Francis-Sharma joins the show to talk about writing her third novel, Casualties of Truth. Lauren explains the intense nature of covering hearings on apartheid practices in South Africa and the process of communicating those learnings through her novel. Join us now as we discuss the origins of her book. BP: So Lauren, I am really delighted to be here with you and you have got Casualties of Truth, your new novel, your third novel, correct? Very exciting. It is coming out, and it is about a woman who lives in Washington D. C. with her family, well Bethesda, Maryland, with her family. And she in the past, in the 1990s, spent some time in South Africa. She's an attorney. And the novel, starts out in the present day in Washington, and someone her husband has hired for his company turns out to be someone who was very important to her in that past in South Africa. So, what I want to talk with you about today is your time in South Africa, since I know you had that, and the question of what it's like to write about a place that was very formative for you as a person and as a writer. So maybe we could start with what it was like to write Prue and to start hearing her memories. Do you remember when that came up? LFS: Yeah, I think so. You know, I started thinking about this book in, while we were in quarantine during COVID. It's an interesting thing that happened to me while we were sort of stuck in our homes was this flooding of memories, reaching for places. And part of this was, I think I needed to do it for my own sort of mental health was just going back to the places that I felt were very, like you said, formative, but also really important to sort of who I'd become. So in my memory, I kept going back. to Johannesburg in 1996 when I was there and I couldn't figure out why I kept going back to like certain places and certain things, but it was just a repetitive memory. And before I knew it, I started to think, well, maybe this is the budding of a story. So in some respects, you know, Prue came up through that moment, or those moments where I was just stuck on that time in my life. BP: Tell us about that time. Why did you go to South Africa in 1996? What were the circumstances? How long were you there? LFS: Yeah, it was a semester. Well, a little longer than a semester, actually. But it was my third year of law school. I was at the University of Michigan, and one of the professors thought it would be an incredible opportunity, given that they just had, you know, two years earlier, their first democratic elections. He thought it'd be wonderful to sort of have a group of students go to South Africa and work on things. And there was just, it was a small group of us and we were all assigned to different. jobs. And my job was at a small law firm in Johannesburg, and they were supporting the ANC, particularly helping, you know, ANC members who wanted to apply for amnesty. As you well know, you know, there was a lot of activism, you know, in the decades before Mandela was released and before the elections. And so a lot of people committed what would be considered crimes and they wanted to, wanted to sort of have the government overlook those, those transgressions that they've made. And it was a very long application process. So I was helping people with the applications. And, you know, it just so happened that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's amnesty hearings were being held in Johannesburg while I was there. It moved around the country quite a bit. I just got lucky that a couple of weeks happened to coincide at the same time that I was in Johannesburg, and so I attended those hearings. BP: Specifically, what you felt you learned, and what you did learn that came to you as you started this writing process? LFS: How much time do we have? So, you know, I think the first thing that I'd like to say about that question is that I believe and I believe I've always been this way. And I know that I write for people who are this way, which is the sense for those people who are, who feel connected, feel globally connected, who feel like the world is important to them. I'm someone who I read everything from everywhere in the world and I write for people to be able to see themselves in whether it's a small village in Trinidad, which was, you know, my first book, whether, you know, it's a, you know, a Black woman from America in South Africa bringing the pieces together who, by the way, is also of West Indian heritage. So there's, you know, there's this real sense that she's you know, bringing in all the pieces of her into this story. So I think that being in South Africa at that time made me realize just how close we are. But on a practical level, you know, the national party, they were looking to the Nazis. The national party, they were looking at Jim Crow laws in America. And as we see now, you know, here in our country, we have people who are looking at the Nazis. And what they did. We have people who are looking back at apartheid South Africa. It's all connected. If we do not understand what happened in South Africa, we cannot know what could happen here. If we don't understand what happened in Nazi Germany, we cannot understand what can happen here. If there's anything that I'd like for someone, and obviously I wrote a book. For entertainment. Yes. And I wrote about, you know, a woman who's, you know, sort of living a very contemporary 2018 life and kind of grappling with motherhood and, you know, and marriage and all those things. But ultimately, it's about community and remembering that, like, South Africa would not be free of apartheid if it were not for community centric, community action people. And I, you know, and I think we lose sight of that so much. We lose sight of how important it is, how serious it is to care, to experience and to be with other people in their pain, to act on behalf of other people. We can get really caught up. I mean, this is what they want. They want us to be individualistic. They want us to think only of ourselves. We cannot dismantle anything thinking only of ourselves. And my character does this, by the way, she is very self centered. BP: What was the hardest thing for you to bring back, to make come alive? LFS: Bethanne, when you're sitting in a place and you're hearing about the murder of eight children, I don't know how you convey that, you know, I, and I did my best and you know, the story that I heard, one of the stories that I heard was about eight boys who and when I say boys, I mean, literally, they were boys, and they like many Black young South Africans wanted to fight against the apartheid system and wanted to be part of the ANC activism and, they were tripped by a South African police operative told that he was going to take them to another country to do training, to be soldiers of, for the ANC. And their parents didn't know. And they snuck off with this man. And they were tortured and they were murdered and during those hearings is when their parents when I was listening to it is when their parents learned what happened to their children. The weeping in that room. How do you, how do you convey that? I did my best. You know, I did my best without sort of you know, numbing the reader. But just trying to convey sort of the everyday horribleness of living under that regime. So that was the most difficult part, was trying to do just enough and not to overwhelm the sensory, the sensory experience of, you know, of a reader, BP: It reminds me of Hannah Arendt's ‘Banality of Evil,’ but it is very difficult because of the banality of evil to bring across what it does to the parents, as you said, to the

    32 min
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A weekly podcast hosted by award-winning host and producer Bethanne Patrick, including themed book recommendations, interviews with great authors, and literary sizzle. thebookmavenunbound.substack.com

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