In this episode of the Book Maven: A Literary Revue, Bethanne Patrick sits down with Xochitl Gonzalez to talk about how experience can help us as writers. We discuss the importance of observing changes in life to guide us in crafting our fiction, and what’s inspiring her as she develops her new book. This week Ethan Frome takes the stage in another installment of Canon or Can It.We’ll discuss how it exists within a context of similar works from the same era, and how maybe with a little experience, we can identify better novels to give canonical bona fides. Can Bethanne beat the clock? She gives us 6 Recs for our To Be Read lists. Titles include: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley, Improvement by Joan Silber, Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt,. . .And Ladies of the Club by Helen Hooven Santmeyer, A Round-Heeled Woman by Jane Juska, and Dixon, Descending by Karen Outen. 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 Gray Wolfby Louise Penny, part of her Three Pines series.Drawn Testimony by Jane Rosenberg, The World According to Garp by John Irving, Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Rainbowby D.H. Lawrence, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin, A Round-Heeled Woman by Jane Juska, Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt, 'Tis by Frank McCourt, Teacher Manby Frank McCourt, And Ladies of the Club by Helen Hooven Santmyer, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley, Dixon, Descending by Karen Outen, Improvement by Joan Silber, and Joan Silber’s upcoming book and Mercy. 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… First, this week, I talked to Xochitl Gonzalez about how experience can help us as writers. Join us in conversation as we talk about what's inspiring her as she develops her new book. BP: Not everyone writes a book when they're 23 and gets on the New Yorker, you know, five under 35 or 500 under 40 or whatever their lists are, some people come to writing after other pieces of life, whether it's jobs, raising families you know, not knowing what to do with ourselves. There's just all kinds of ways that you can, let's say, delay writing a book. But those delays, and you've talked about this before can add to the writing. So I wanted to talk with you today about that. What do you think? XG: Oh my gosh, you know, so much. And it's funny because I'm working on my third book now and it's a character just looking back, like, let's see, she's probably about 32 at the time that she's telling the story looking back on something that happened when she was about 28 and I was … BP: All that way back. XG: Yeah, you know, not, not that far, but I was thinking about how there’s a phase like in your 30s where you start to put patterns together and like, you know, you start to, you've seen things enough that you're like, oh, I see, like, this is like, an unavoidable now that I can see, like, I've now lived just a little bit longer that I'm like, I understand this, what it would happen now in a different way. And I think, you know, one of the things that I think is so great about aging and doing things a little older is that you not only have more access to people and like experiences and behavior, but you have access to the way that your own viewpoint has changed at different phases of your own life. You know, like, and like, so I think about like, if I'm writing a character like with my last book, even I was thinking about it was so fun because there was like a character who was in college and the way she was seeing a professor who was probably in his late thirties, you know, like very late thirties and he's getting a divorce and to her, he's like this sad old man, you know, like but that is how you saw people even though, you know, right? Like, it's like he's only about 40, but like, like, I think it's also the access to how the world is seen at different phases of our life and how we would react to like a 60 year old character is going to have conflict in a very different way than a 28 year old character is going to have conflict, right? And it's just interesting to kind of use that knowledge of watching all the people in your life age, and how they see things differently. And if it's like, it's just this awesome thing to understand and see. BP: Writing when you have more experience, while your novels have a lot of fun stuff in them, they have a lot of serious stuff in them as well. And some of the serious stuff is, you know, some of it is interpersonal. Some of it is bigger. Some of it is, you know, on the political stage, whether it's about sexuality and identity or, you know, power given to a territory, sovereignty, if you will. And you know, all of those kinds of things. Did you find that was something that grew out of the way you wrote, or was that something that you decided, I need to learn how to do this because these are the things I need to write about. XG: I think that what I found is that in the realm of media, right? Like, I went into fiction before I ended up becoming a non fiction writer, so like, it's the opposite. But, you know, for my first book in particular, and then I think I just sort of realized that these are the things that I'm fascinated with. But in my first book, I really took on, I was trying to find, invent a plot that was entertaining in order to call attention to something that I felt media could not fully realize, like in a humanistic way, like it kept it sort of two dimensional, and unless you knew people living in Puerto Rico, let's say, or people that were, you know, Puerto Rican Americans, like in the diaspora you might not have any sense of feeling about it. You know what I mean? And I think and I was feeling this sense of real sadness around gentrification of my own hometown in Brooklyn, and I felt, I don't think I could read read dozens of articles about the situation in Puerto Rico or about Brooklyn gentrifying, and none of them make you feel the way humans feel, and so I had to invent a story to walk people through these feelings, to try to create some empathy, where I didn't think there would, there was awareness enough to feel empathy. BP: And that is, of course, another one of the things that's so important about having some experience under your belt before you start writing is that empathy, isn't it? XG: I think that that's right. And I think, you know, and I think even with the second book, I just, I wanted to talk about this idea, you know, this word erasure kind of became very buzzy, but I was like, but you know, it's an actual process that has happened over time. And I kind of wanted to look at that and then how that impacts people, you know, like, because I, as a creator, like, you know, as a creator doing, you know, working on adaptations of my book for in Hollywood was seeing the lack of like sort of rungs in the ladder between me and like the person that had come before me. Like, I'm like, Oh my gosh. And how that was making my job harder to some extent, because there wasn't cultural fluency, let's say between me and the people that are around the side of power. And that like, and sort of from that, I had this idea for the second book, but I think the main thing about the second book is that then it was really important for me, the villain, obviously one person's a murderer in the second book, but like the villain of the book. BP: Don't spoil it for me. No, I'm kidding. XG: No, but it's less of a person. It's less a person than its systems. You know, it's like systems and the way systems operate. And it was really important for me to show that there are good, well intended people that work within systems. And so, you know, that same sort of sad 40 year old man, he's a professor, and it was important for me as a fiction writer of a certain age, because I think when you're young and you're mad, there are good people and bad people. And I think when you're older and you've known people, you're like, there are people with opinions that cause good, and there are people with opinions that sometimes cause bad, and they might be good people, but they believe this thing. BP: And, there are, because this, this week, as we know, we've had some awful news in the literary community, there are people who, can have these lovely, you know, genteel conversations and you think, oh, what a great, great person that is. XG: That's right. Well, and I just, you know, I think one of the things that I've been thinking about and that also age kind of gives you is like, it's like just because somebody has become very good at something, anything, you know, like, that doesn't mean that they are a good person. Like you can be very successful and be a sort of fundamentally kind of rotten human being, like, and having money or status doesn't equate to virtue. You need to, not only do you need to move through the world for, I think, a few decades to kind of really see that because you don't presume you can't just presume them to be bad. That's just a caricature, but really understanding it right. Like, I think you have to move through the world for a few years. But I also think that that was a case where like sort of understanding power, also, I was really fortunate to work in a few different professions where I had access to a lot of people that were successful and powerful. And I think that then it gave you like kind of an upfront seat to look at these dynamics. And I couldn't
