The Bookshop Podcast
The Bookshop Podcast
From Medicine to Fiction: Danielle Teller's Literary Journey
In this episode, I chat with Danielle Teller about how her creative journey defies conventional wisdom about career paths. From Yale-trained pulmonologist studying lung disease to acclaimed novelist, her story demonstrates how life's unexpected turns might lead us exactly where we're meant to be.
"I was a huge bookworm when I was a kid, but I was too chicken to actually write," Teller says. She explains how her fears centered on financial insecurity and feeling she lacked stories to tell, until a cross-country move disrupted her academic medical career and her husband encouraged her to pursue this long-held dream.
Teller's latest novel, Forged, transports readers to America's Gilded Age through the story of Fanny, a desperate young woman navigating a Darwinian world of social stratification and ruthless capitalism. What makes this historical fiction particularly compelling is Teller's revelation that our current era mirrors that period of extreme wealth disparities and political corruption. "I think that my research reinforced my feeling that we are in a second Gilded Age," she explains, describing the disturbing parallels between past and present.
Our conversation ventures beyond the novel to explore the publishing industry's subjective nature, including how finding the right agent resembles "matchmaking." Teller's unique perspective shapes characters who defy traditional female protagonist tropes, creating women who actively forge their own destinies despite societal constraints.
Subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode to help more readers discover thought-provoking historical fiction that illuminates both past and present.
Danielle Teller
The Elements of Eloquence, Mark Forsyth
Hi, my name is Mandy Jackson-Beverly and I'm a bibliophile. Welcome to the Bookshop Podcast. Each week, I present interviews with authors, independent bookshop owners and booksellers from around the globe and publishing professionals. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media, and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. You're listening to Episode 300.
Speaker 1:Danielle Teller received her medical training at McGill University, brown University and Yale University. She has held faculty positions at the University of Pittsburgh and Harvard University. In 2013, danielle pursued her childhood dream of being a writer. Danielle pursued her childhood dream of being a writer. She co-wrote the nonfiction book Sacred Cows the Truth About Divorce and Marriage with her husband, astro Teller, and has written numerous columns for Quartz. She lives with her husband and their four children in Palo Alto, california. Her first book of fiction was titled All the Ever Afters the Untold Story of Cinderella's Stepmother, and her latest novel is titled Forged. Hi, danielle, and welcome to the show. It's lovely to have you here. Hi, I'm very happy to be here. Thank you.
Speaker 1:I thoroughly enjoyed reading your new book, forged, and here's a quick synopsis of the book. In the Gilded Age, a time of abject poverty and obscene wealth, a desperate and ambitious young woman strikes out for a new life in the rising industrial cities of America. Naive Fanny is thrust into a Darwinian world where she is cast out and preyed upon, but she's a survivor and quickly learns from her struggles. Thanks to her close observations of the mercenary actors around her, fanny discovers the power of illusion and how it can overcome the immutability of social class and the ruthless rules of capitalism. It's a fun read, thank you. Let's start by learning a bit about your background in medicine and academia Before your transition into writing. What inspired the shift?
Speaker 2:I think, like a lot of people, I always wanted to write a book. I always wanted to be a writer. I was a huge bookworm when I was a kid but I was too chicken to actually write. I think it was two issues. One was I wanted a secure income and it's very hard to make a living to feed yourself writing. And then the other was I, when I was young. I felt like I didn't have stories that I needed to tell, even though I loved consuming them and I wanted to share that experience with other people, but I didn't feel like I had the material in my head. Other people, but I didn't feel like I had the material in my head.
Speaker 2:So I embarked on a career in medicine and I was really happy in academic medicine. It's a bit of a niche job. I had a small lab and had a lot of freedom of inquiry in the lab and I loved teaching the house staff super bright, super motivated young people Loved working with them. And what happened was you know, through the course of life and the changes that we don't expect I had to move to California from Boston because I was remarried, getting remarried and we were blending our young families getting remarried and we were blending our young families, and I couldn't find a job at that time that I loved as much as the one I was leaving.
Speaker 2:So I was pretty unhappy about that, and it was actually my husband who said you've always wanted to write. You don't have to bow down to the sunk cost fallacy that you've spent all this time stuffing your head full of information. But that's okay, you can change, you can do something completely different, and so, yeah, that's why I changed. I wish I could say that it was more of a choice on my part, where I was driven to do it, but it really took a bit of a carrot, and my part where I was driven to do it, but it really took a bit of a carrot and stick to get me there.
Speaker 1:Well, it's never easy taking that first step into the unknown, and it reminds me of your character, fanny, in your book. You know it took her a lot of courage to do what she did and to take that first step. Now you co-wrote a nonfiction book titled Sacred Cows the Truth About Divor, divorce and marriage, with your husband, astro Teller, and it was published in 2014. And then, in 2018, your first novel, all the Ever Afters, the untold story of Cinderella's stepmother, was released, and recently your novel Forged was published. So what prompted the shift from nonfiction to fiction?
Speaker 2:So what prompted the shift from nonfiction to fiction? I don't think of it really as a shift. Sacred Cows was really a one-off. It was a project that my husband and I decided, kind of on a whim, to do together, and it was really born of the fact that we had both been through divorces and that's a tough time in life, and we spent a lot of time talking about it and we were really surprised at ourselves in a way, because, like most people, we never thought we would end up getting divorced, and so I hadn't really thought critically about the process and about society's attitudes surrounding marriage and divorce, and what really struck us was the sort of hypocrisy in so many of the messages that we get from society.
Speaker 2:And my husband, astro, is an entrepreneur and of course he's so optimistic and thinks we can do anything, and so he said we should write a book, and I thought he was crazy, but I went along with it, and so it was a bit of catharsis for us, and it was also trying to get a message out to people who are in that rough time that there are compassionate people and that you don't have to listen to all of the harsh, harsh messages that you're getting from society. So it wasn't that I ever intended to become a nonfiction writer. It was just a spontaneous project.
Speaker 1:All the Ever Afters and Forged center around strong female protagonists, women born into poverty who rise in society, only to stumble as Fanny does in Forged. Was it the underdog struggle and rise to success that drew you to these stories?
Speaker 2:It's interesting because they were both inspired in completely different ways. All the Ever Afters was really inspired by my own struggles being a stepmother and realizing how challenging it is for stepchildren and stepparents. You know that that is a very fraught relationship. And just again, thinking about how stepmothers are portrayed in literature that I listened to about this real life woman who was born on a subsistence farm in Canada and ended up defrauding banks of millions of dollars and it wasn't until I started writing Forge that I realized how similar these, that both rags to riches stories and, as you say, both underdog stories. So it wasn't deliberate on my part, but I do think that I want to write stories about women who have some agency and who really actively take part in their fates. I think too often when we read stories about a male protagonist, they're the heroes, and female protagonists often are acted upon by the world, which of course, they are in my stories as well. But I did love the little twist at the end.
Speaker 1:I found that Grace arguably emerged as the true hero. I wondered while writing the novel did you ever consider having Fanny stay with Grace, and what ultimately made you decide to have her take the less safe or perhaps more courageous step and leave the household less safe or perhaps more?
Speaker 2:courageous step and leave the household. I think that Fanny was always going to be a bit of a villain. I like these morally ambiguous characters. I think both stepmother and Fanny slash Kitty are not great people in some ways and they don't always act with integrity. Certainly not Kitty. She is a criminal and hurts people around her in many ways, and so I think Grace really is there as a sort of moral counterweight, sort of showing the path of a woman who had just as many challenges, maybe more, than Fanny had, and who stuck to the straight and narrow. I think Kitty was always going to be a duplicitous and criminal actor.
Speaker 1:The rebel. Yes, let's talk a little about the process of writing this story, because I'm wondering what came first in your process the story of an impoverished young girl or the idea of using extreme societal and wealth disparities of the Gilded Age as your backdrop?
Speaker 2:I can't say that one came first. I was really interested in both. Again, I listened to this podcast and was fascinated with this real life character from the Gilded Age and being a Canadian and she was Canadian I thought, why have I never heard of this woman? And so I got really interested in her story. But I also have long felt that we are moving into a second Gilded Age in many ways, and so I wanted to tell that story as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you think of the Gilded Age and the perfect word is disparity, the huge space between the rich, the wealthy in New York at that time and the people living in poverty. I mean, if you look at old photographs of that time, it's just tragic and, as you said, somewhat scary, because we're seeing a lot of that imbalance across the country now. As you were researching for Forged, were there any historical facts or details that you found especially surprising, fascinating or disturbing?
Speaker 2:So I think that my research reinforced my feeling that we are in a second Gilded Age. The amount of cronyism and political corruption was much deeper than I realized before I started doing my research. You know there was so much overlap between public and private enterprises, which again we're seeing now in spades, and I also wasn't aware. We think of progress, as always moving in a positive direction, and of course there were so many changes with industrialization that brought good to the world. But I hadn't realized that life expectancies took a big step backward, that people were a lot less healthy, that during that time when people were shoved together in these big cities without proper sanitation, that there were cholera outbreaks and, yeah, child mortality was very high.
Speaker 2:And I think also when we see depictions of the Gilded Age on television or in movies, we don't see the mountains of garbage and manure that were in New York at that time. The streets were just awash in it and apparently they would pile the manure in any empty lot. They were like these mini mountains of horse manure and we tend to think of the beautiful gowns and the fancy mansions from that era, but don't think much about how the 99% were living, which was not great at that time I was also interested because I was writing about women in that era. I was surprised to find that there were women who were making their way in a men's world in ways that I hadn't realized. There were women self-made millionaires, and we don't hear enough about those people. I think.
Speaker 1:Something that comes to my mind, which is just tragic during that time, is the amount of children who are destitute, abandoned. They lost their parents and they became orphans.
Speaker 2:And the working conditions are horrendous. And I feel, in a way, that we're going back to that a little bit in. When you think about Amazon workers who can't afford to put food on the table, and then we have these billionaire CEOs going to space and their little phallic rockets. It's very similar.
Speaker 1:Yes, it is similar and terrifying and just heartbreaking. Let's talk about your journey with publishing. Can you share your publishing story with us, from your first finished manuscript to signing with an agent and securing a book deal?
Speaker 2:It was circuitous, as many of these journeys are. We had an agent for Sacred Cows who wasn't interested in the novel, so I had to find a new agent and was lucky enough to interest Michael Carlisle from Inkwell Management. And it was a bit of a funny story because I am absolutely terrible at self-promotion and I thought I had sort of sent a very positive note to him with the manuscript and he just assumed he was going to tell me to go away and, you know, go to a writing conference or something. And then he read it and absolutely loved it. And it was so funny because I thought I had done such a great job Not a great job at the book, but I thought I had done such a great job and not a great job at the book, but I thought I had presented myself in a good light.
Speaker 2:And when he read what I wrote about myself he was like, oh, she obviously doesn't know what she's doing and it's not really worth reading this. But I'm glad he did, I'm glad he read it and I'm glad he fell in love with it. I think so much of this process is like dating, where the chemistry just has to be right and because some people reject it doesn't mean that someone else is not going to think it's great. So he took it on. He knew from the outset that it was a little bit of an unusual book. It didn't really fit neatly into any one category, and so it took him a long time to find a home for it. And he did find a home with Jennifer Brill at William Morrow, and that was a similar story where she you know it just spoke to her, and so she argued forcefully for it to get it published, and so that's how it found a home after many rejections.
Speaker 1:Just to go back on a couple of things that you've raised rejections. Just to go back on a couple of things that you've raised. One of them is that, yes, most creatives live a solitary life while they're working on a project and for authors, often the difficult part of writing is actually writing that query letter and, as you said, writing something about yourself which is short, concise and kind of fits in a nutshell. And I think that unknown and that insecurity for authors or some authors, I should say is still there when it comes to self-promotion once their book is published. And I have noticed this through speaking with other authors, you know, through interviews or conversations. Nobody has taught these people how to have a conversation with someone who's interested in their work and for many it's difficult talking about themselves and their work, not to mention being on social media. Talking about what they're doing is also something that's difficult for so many authors. Yeah, oh, that's interesting. And getting back to you and your query letter, you were so darn lucky that your agent read your manuscript.
Speaker 2:Yes, so lucky, yeah, and there's so much luck in this process which I think people who haven't experienced it for themselves don't realize. There's so many great novels that never see the light of day, and then there's some not so great that end up flourishing, and I think there's just a lot of randomness.
Speaker 1:Yes, randomness and everything is subjective. You never know what is going on in someone's life that day, that moment that they start reading your query letter or reading your first chapter. You just don't know and that can affect how they relate to your story and to your nutshell of information about yourself.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that your book has some chemistry with some reader. That's really what it's. Yeah, it's like matchmaking.
Speaker 1:Oh, I like that matchmaking for authors. I did want to ask you a little bit more about your writing process, in particular the research. Did you do all of the research at one time and then sit down to do your first draft, or did you kind of go back and forth and back and forth?
Speaker 2:I always do research as I'm writing as well, but I am, you know, not being a historian and not knowing that much about that era. I did read a bunch of books and took a lot of notes before I started, but even as I'm going, the internet is such a wonderful resource now for historical details, using people who post videos of how historical garments are constructed and interiors of historical buildings. And it used to be in the old days you had to actually go to these places and now you can do everything from your laptop pretty much.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I often wonder what my mom and dad would have thought of all this. Okay, Danielle, let's talk about books. What are you currently reading?
Speaker 2:I am reading Goddess Complex by Sanjana Sethian, which is a really refreshingly different book. I have a wonderful book club and we are reading Orbital by Samantha Harvey, which is also an unusual book. And I have a book it's not literally on my bed stand, but it's one of those books that you sort of pick up and you read in little chunks which is the Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth. It's a wonderfully witty book about words and prose and it's poetry and prose. Actually it's a really fun read and it has very short chapters and I just gobble up a little chapter and then put it down again.
Speaker 1:I have that book and I love it, and I agree with what you said about sometimes you just need something to read when you don't have a lot of time or, in the case of this book, you just want to be nourished, literally. I find I'm like that with nonfiction. I find it difficult to sit down and read a whole nonfiction book at one time, and quite often I'll get the audio as well as the book, listen to it and one chapter and then go read it, or the opposite read it and then listen to it.
Speaker 2:Do you read books on paper exclusively?
Speaker 1:I'd say for about the past nine years I've only read paperbacks and hardcovers. I'm in front of a computer or a phone for a big part of the day and I just found it's too much. I don't want to read a book on a Kindle or, you know, a tablet. I went through a stage where I enjoyed it, but not anymore, and also for my work for the podcast and for the in-person interviews I do with authors, I sticky note all over the book, so I, you know I like to be able to do that Now. I know that you can bookmark on, you know, an ebook, but that's not how my brain works. I do want to ask you one thing before we go what kind of science were you?
Speaker 2:exploring. So my specialty was pulmonary, which is lung medicine and critical care. Traditionally in the US, lung doctors became the heads of the intensive care units, not exclusively, but those two things were married, because ventilators were actually what created the modern ICU. And so for my research I studied chronic lung disease and more specifically, a condition called idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, which is a big mouthful, but it's a disease that people die from progressive scarring of the lung tissue and they have a harder and harder time breathing. It's a terrible disease and the cause of it is unknown, which is what idiopathic means, and I was fascinated with that, and not just that specific disease.
Speaker 2:But when we have organ failure of any kind, the ultimate cause of failure is scarring. You know, when the tissue is attacked in certain ways and it can't regenerate, normally what we end up with is scar tissue. And so heart failure, liver failure, lung failure, all in the chronic sense, they all result in scarring. And so I was searching for ways to either prevent that scarring or try to reverse some of it. Do you miss it?
Speaker 2:I miss certain aspects of it. I mostly miss working with mentees and students. I love that and I do miss the scientific inquiry part of it. There are a lot of parts I don't miss. There is a lot of red tape and a lot of working through the weekend and right now. My friends who are still in the business have had a really tough time because of course they bore the brunt of the COVID epidemic in the intensive, have had a really tough time because of course they bore the brunt of the COVID epidemic in the intensive care units and they've lost a lot of staff and things have just been tough from that perspective. And now with NIH money drying up, it means there's a lot of insecurity, you know people dropping out of research and so right now I'm very grateful to be doing what I'm doing.
Speaker 1:A few years ago I had some conversations with nurses who had moved from New York out to Los Angeles. They worked in intensive care and they were working through the worst of you know, the pandemic in New York. They said they needed a little self-healing and sunshine because they were so physically and emotionally drained and, of course, overworked.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was a terribly traumatic time for the workers and so hard to see these people dying without their families close by, because of course they weren't allowed to let people, they weren't allowed to let visitors in, and that was so heartbreaking for the staff to watch.
Speaker 1:With this thought in mind, I have a question Do you know if people in the medical profession are now getting the mental health care that they need, that they were told they would receive?
Speaker 2:There's a real ethos of stoicism in medicine, at least in my generation. I think things have changed quite a bit over the years and that the younger generation are more open to getting help and they're taking better care of themselves. But when we were going through training and so on, it was all about just being as tough as you can and not showing emotion and getting through and not even thinking about yourself. And I think it's a lot tougher for nurses than doctors too, because they're both in the sense of the trauma. They're closer to the patients, they spend a lot more time with them, they get to know their families better, but also they have to take orders from other people, and that just makes everything a lot tougher. I think they have a really, really hard job.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they do. I would be remiss if I didn't say anything about the cover of Forged. It is gorgeous.
Speaker 2:I love it. Yes, I really love the cover. There's so much to see. I didn't actually that central the fountain pen shape. I didn't realize what it was at first.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's very clever. Thank you so much for being a guest on the show. It's been great chatting with you and I apologize for kind of going off track a little bit towards the end, but I am fascinated with people's life stories, and yours is interesting. Thanks again, danielle, and I wish you all the best of luck. Thank you so much, mandy.
Speaker 2:This was really fun.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to my conversation with Danielle Teller about her new book Forged. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media, and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. To find out more about the Bookshop Podcast, go to thebookshoppodcastcom and make sure to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to the show. You can also follow me at Mandy Jackson Beverly on Instagram and Facebook and on YouTube at the Bookshop Podcast. If you have a favorite indie bookshop that you'd like to suggest we have on the podcast, I'd love to hear from you via the contact form at thebookshoppodcastcom. The Bookshop Podcast is written and produced by me, mandy Jackson-Beverly, theme music provided by Brian Beverly, and my executive assistant and graphic designer is Adrian Otterhan. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time.