Julie Cohen: 1990

Julie Cohen talks about the summer of 1990, when she waitressed at a seafood restaurant in Maine and used her tips to go on a road trip to Graceland.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Hello, I'm Laura Pearson, and this is That Summer, a podcast about being a teenager. Each episode, I talk to a different guest about the most pivotal summer of their teenage years. We're talking first love, first loss, first steps into the adult world. We're going deep into their teenage crushes, the music on their mixtapes and playlists, and some of the biggest feelings they've ever felt. If you like the sound of that, you might like my novel What Happened That Summer, which explores some of these themes. It features a pop star, a theme park, a podcast, and plenty of 90s nostalgia. And it's out now. My guest today is the fabulous Julie Cohen, who grew up in Maine in the USA but now lives here in the UK and has sold over a million copies of her books. Julie Cohen, thank you so much for talking to me on That Summer Today. Thank you for having me. You are the author of both emotional book club fiction and then more recently feminist thrillers. So can you tell listeners a little bit about what you've got coming up or just recently out in both of those genres?

SPEAKER_01 1:29

Sure. Um so Laura, I have a recently I I've had a book out called Paradise, which is an emotional thr emotional relationship novel. It's written by Julie Cohen, which is my real name, and it's set on a lake in Maine, which is based on the lake where I grew up in Maine. Um, and it's about a woman who travels around all the time. She never settles anywhere, but every summer she goes back to the lake and the lake house that she calls paradise. And there she sees her family, and she also sees her best friend Nick, who she's known since she was a little girl, and who lives at the lake year-round. But in the summer of 2021, she gets in an accident and she wakes up with no memory of the past 18 months. That means she's forgotten the pandemic, she's forgotten everything that's happened, and she's also forgotten all of the major catastrophic things that have happened to her family and between her and her best friend, and nobody's telling her what happened. So it's a little bit of a mystery, but it's an emotional mystery. It's about the relationships between them and the relationship of people to the world that happened. You know, after in 2021, we were different people than we were in 2020. Yeah. Um, and she's trying to deal with that um through the whole book. So it's very different from my thrillers, nobody dies.

SPEAKER_00 3:01

And so I think it's so interesting how people, different writers are using the pandemic in such different ways. Um, you know, I think when it was when we were in it, uh editors were like, Don't write about the pandemic, nobody wants to read about the pandemic. But I think now we've kind of far enough past it that uh I've you know I've seen people use it for thrillers. Um, there was a thriller where a couple had to move in, didn't have to, but they did move in together very, very quickly because it was either that or not see each other at all. And then so just utilising what happened for plot, and I and it's just so fascinating to see, and I think I think people will continue to use it for a long time.

SPEAKER_01 3:44

Yeah, and there was that great one, um, was it called How to Bury Your Husband, which was about the explosion of domestic violence during the pandemic, and it was about three women coping with that, right? Well, killing their husbands. I mean it's it's right there in their in the title. Um, but it was really based in that very, very grim reality.

SPEAKER_00 4:08

Yeah, there were so many elements like that, weren't there? About you know, children who the only proper meal they got was at school and suddenly they weren't at school, and you know, families who weren't safe at home and didn't have that escape and that outlet. Yeah, it's a um a terrifying thing in a lot of ways. That sounds fabulous, paradise. So that's out now.

SPEAKER_01 4:32

That's out now, yep. And then I have a thriller out as well under my pseudonym, Julie May Cohen, and that's called Body Count. And that's a sequel to my first Julie May Cohen book, Bad Men, about a female serial killer who only kills bad men. Although you can read body count on its own, it doesn't depend on the first one for plot points, you can understand them on its own. But body count is about Safi, who's the female serial killer, and she's in a relationship for the first time with a true crime podcaster called Jonathan, um, who has no idea that she kills like a ton of people, like all the time. She was always killing somebody, and she doesn't let him know. Um, and all through the book, she's trying to balance her relationship, which is new because she's never really been able to have a relationship because obviously serial killer. Um, and she is also trying to hunt down a person who is like a Jimmy Savile type character. He's a TV presenter who's also a paedophile, and so she's trying to hunt him down. And at the same time, she's getting relationship therapy, um, trying to understand why it is that her relationship isn't working the way she thinks it should be working. I mean, she never really figures out that the reason why it's not working the way it should be working is that because she is killing a ton of people, but um, hopefully the reader understands that. Uh, it was a super fun book to write, and you can tell it's very different from my Julie Cohen book.

SPEAKER_00 6:11

Yeah, I've read Bad Men and Body Count, and yeah, you're right, you could read them individually. Um, but it's it's nice to read both. Um, but yeah, they're super fun to read as well. And do you like I'm always interested when people write in completely different genres. Do you have a favorite or do you like having the mix?

SPEAKER_01 6:33

Do you know I am most proud of the books that I've written as myself, um, Julie Cohen, because I think they're more layered, I think they're more atmospheric. I probably put more of my um real feelings and emotions into them. Um, and they've been real personal challenges for me structurally and in the content of them. Um, so like, you know, I've wrote a historical novel, I've wrote a novel backwards, I wrote an alternate reality novel, and those novels are the novels that I'm really super proud of. Um the Julie Maycoan books are just pure joy to write, they are so much fun, and I laugh my ass off like constantly while I'm writing them, and it's really good, especially with the world as it is. And Laura, my post-menopausal rage, I'm telling you. So it's really good to have that outlet for those things. And I think all my books tackle the same sort of things. Like I'm always writing about relationships between people, I'm always I'm often writing about sexual violence, um, and I'm also often writing about gender inequality, uh, but in completely different ways. You know, one is feminism and one is feminism with knives, which is the way I always say it. Uh so they they're just both really dear to my heart, and I'm really I I enjoy writing them both. One is harder to write than the other, for sure.

SPEAKER_00 8:07

Yeah, I think it's nice to have a couple of strings to your bow, isn't it? And to think, okay, now I'm gonna do one like this, now I'm gonna do one like that. It's fun. Um, but yeah, that makes perfect sense, and I think the joy you have in writing those feminist thrillers comes through in the reading of them, so that's good.

SPEAKER_01 8:26

Good. It they are so much fun. Like, I am just cackling the whole time that I'm reading them. I mean, and I know that means I have a weird sense of humor, you know, like, oh my god, he got stabbed again. But you know, it it amuses me.

SPEAKER_00 8:41

Writing books is hard, so we have to take the joy where we find it in that process.

SPEAKER_01 8:48

Absolutely, you really do, and wherever you find it, even if it's just in in putting little practic little jokes that nobody's going to see in there, or the writing itself, or the publishing, you have to find something in there that's gonna keep you going because you know, God knows it's not making us millionaires.

SPEAKER_00 9:08

No, it's not it's a tough gig and getting tougher, I think. So um I asked you which summer of your teenage years you wanted to talk about, and you said 1990. So, for listeners to kind of get them into the right mindset, 1990 is the year that Margaret Thatcher resigned, it's the year that Nelson Mandela was released from prison, it was the year that Germany was reunified, and it was the start of the Gulf War. But you, Julie, were in the States, and I'm thinking you were in Maine. But could you tell us a little bit about how first how old you were, where you were living, and who you were living with that summer?

SPEAKER_01 9:52

Yes, so I've cheated a little bit because actually I was 20 in that summer. Sorry. Ah, that's okay. I forgot that we needed to be teenagers. Um in 1990, I was had just finished my second year of university, and I had three friends from high school um, Kathy, Trina, and David. And the reason why I picked this is because I talked with Kathy on the phone the other day. We've been friends for over 50 years now. Um, and because we met when I was five and she was six, she's a little bit older. I like to remind her of that.

SPEAKER_00 10:31

You went to the same university?

SPEAKER_01 10:33

We went to the same high school. Right. We went to the same school. Um, very it was a very small, we both come from the small town in Maine. All of us come from the small town in Maine. Me, Kathy, Trina, and David, it's the four of us. And the small town we lived in was a mill town, um, and there was not a lot of opportunities for work there. So Kathy's parents had recently moved from Rumford, which is in the mountains, to a place called Ellsworth, which is near the coast. Now, in Maine, coastal Maine is where all the action is at in the summer. It's a place where people come for vacations, and so there's a lot of casual work in the summer. So that summer, the year before, every summer when I was at university, we used to go and live at Kathy's parents' house and get summer jobs and save up money for university. And I have no idea. Kathy's parents, Frida and Howard, were total legends because they would actually leave the house and let us live there. Where did they go? Well, in Maine, a lot of people have lake houses, camps. Right. So that's like what I was talking about with my book, Paradise. A lot of people have them now. They sound very grand, but in Kathy's parents, it's it was a shack in the woods because we lived there for a while too. But it had been in their family for generations, right? They just had this place that they would go, they'd live by the lake for the summer. So they would let us live in the house. And this is a beautiful house. It was like a five-bedroom Victorian detached house. It's absolutely gorgeous. And sh and they let a bunch of 20-year-olds live in it all summer. And like we were moving people in, you know, people who needed a place to say, oh, yeah, sure, you can stay, whatever. I have no idea why they let us do that. And that was the summer that um that Kathy. This was before I got there, I think. I think Kathy and Trina and David like wallpapered the downstairs bathroom in pictures of guns and roses. Like, I'm pretty sure they did that. And like when Frida turned up, she was like, Oh, look at that. There's Axl Rose in my downstairs bathroom.

unknown 12:49

She didn't care.

SPEAKER_00 12:50

They were very chilled-out parents.

SPEAKER_01 12:53

They were just great. I just, I just love them. They're both they're both gone now, but oh, they were just wonderful. So we were working in um all three of us, me, Kathy, and Trina. David refused to work in food servants service. I think he has always refused to work in full food service. But me, Kathy, and Trina were all working at this restaurant called the Log Cabin, which was a real tourist restaurant. Like it had um, it mostly served lobster and seafood and clam chowder. And so we were all working there. I was a waitress, and Kathy and Trina were hostesses, or maybe Trina did some waitressing. So we were all working there to get some money and living in this house and you know, illegally drinking because it was, you know, the age was 21.

SPEAKER_00 13:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:45

And um, it was really, really fun. And it was the summer before I was going to uh the UK for the first time. So I was gonna spend my third year of undergraduate at Cambridge University, and I so I was getting ready to move countries, and little did I know that that would end up with me living here permanently. Um, but so it was my last summer, really, as being a proper American, you know, someone who lived in America. And all through that summer, we worked in this horrible restaurant. I mean, it was awful, and the the people there just wanted to eat cheap and they didn't tip well and whatever. But we would save up our tips. Um, and in America, tipping is a big thing, but we would we would spend most, you know, in in America at that time anyway, your your hourly wage was about a dollar fifty, and then everything else was the tips that you would make, which you would have to declare a certain amount to the tax man, but not all. So it was a lot of tax-free um income if they tipped well. But if they didn't tip well, you were making one dollar fifty an hour, what's that about 75p? Um, and which 75p wasn't much in 1990 either.

SPEAKER_00 15:07

No.

SPEAKER_01 15:08

And and so we would take, we would spend all the we take all the cash, all the bills, we would put in the bank, but all of the change we put in big jars. And we had these huge jars in the um kitchen, and when on the weekends that we weren't working or the nights that we weren't working, we would sit at the kitchen table and we would put the change into rolls so we could bring it to the bank. So, but we kept it all sort of separate, and we had all these change in rolls, and we were counting up how much we were making. And at the end of that summer, we used that money as gas money to drive to Graceland to see Elvis's house.

SPEAKER_00 15:55

So you didn't save it for so sorry, was that just the coins or was that all of the just the coins. Just the coins.

SPEAKER_01 16:01

No, the money we kept. You know, we the money we used on groceries, we used on beer, and we used and we saved. But the coins, we decided we would just keep the coins to do this once-in-a-lifetime road trip to Graceland with a guy who I went to university with, uh, whose name was Tal, who played the guitar and who was a huge Elvis van. So we went and picked him up. We got my car, which was a 1980-something Chevy Nova, which is the same as a Vauxhall Astra here. Um, and so we got into my car. It was this little gold car called Helen, and we drove down to New Jersey to pick up Tal. Now, people in the UK don't realize what distances these are. This is like, it took us 12 hours to reach New Jersey. I mean, it's a long drive because we're up in the north of Maine. We picked up Tal. We had a boot full of tents and sleeping bags. Tal had to take his guitar, um, and we drove to Graceland. We we um would camp out at night, just go to campgrounds and stay in a tent. I think me, Trina, and Kathy had one tent, and Tal had his own tent.

SPEAKER_00 17:21

So Dave, your dad your friend David didn't go with you on this trip.

SPEAKER_01 17:24

David didn't go, no. David just was that was not his thing. Um, he had other plans. I think he was traveling, so he he went and did something else. So it was just us three, me, Kathy, Trina, and me, Kathy, and Trina, and Tal. And Tal was really long, so he was really tall, tall Tal. So his feet would always stick out the end of his tank. And I remember to save money, we decided we weren't gonna stop, you know, at restaurants or anything like that. We're just gonna bring all our food with us. So we had this cooler in the back full of food and you know, drinks. And Kathy, Trina, and I had been pretty sensible. You know, we had bread and peanut butter and you know, mac and cheese that we could cook over a campfire and stuff like that, you know, cheap student food, but it was stuff, you know, it was stuff. Tal turns up and all he has, all he has, Laura, he has a tent, he has a sleeping bag, he has a guitar, and he has like six boxes, like many big Costco boxes of blueberry Pop-Tarts.

SPEAKER_00 18:31

That is not what I was expecting you to say. I was expecting you to say beer.

SPEAKER_01 18:36

No, no, we didn't have beer. Tal didn't drink anyway, and we didn't we were driving, so we didn't have any beer on that whole trip. We were just, you know, driving whatever. So he just had blueberry pop-tarts.

SPEAKER_00 18:47

We're like, and did he just can did he just survive on those the entire trip? Is that what he ate the whole trip?

SPEAKER_01 18:52

Yes, he did. We were like, Tal, we can't eat blueberry pop-tarts or three meals a day. He's like, why not? Like, okay. So he ate blueberry pop tarts and we ate other stuff. And yeah, we drove to Graceland, and on the way we stopped at Nashville and we went to the Country Music Hall of Fame. And I remember visiting that, and that was really cool. And we went to Graceland, and what an amazing place that was. I mean, that was incredible to go there. Um, much smaller than you would think it would be. Uh, and we visited Memphis, we went to Star Studios, we we uh went to Bourbon Street, not Bourbon Street, what's the street in Memphis? Uh Beale Street. Okay. And Tal just played his guitar the entire time. Um, at one point we were driving. This is awful, we were 20 years old, we took turns driving, and Tal was so tall that he could steer the car with his knees while he played guitar with the neck of the guitar out the window. I hope my parents never hear this because that was a stupid thing to do. I hope my kid never hears this either, because that's never do that. Um, and we just had a great time. That was just a huge adventure.

SPEAKER_00 20:12

Yeah, it sounds like it. And I'm really glad that you uh pushed the limits and went to 20 because this is definitely the summer that is worth talking about on this podcast.

SPEAKER_01 20:23

Um I mean, a lot of the other summers were where I had my first kiss and you know, when I wrote wrote my first book and all of that stuff, but that was a really special time because I am still friends. I don't know, I haven't been in touch with Tal, but I am still friends with all with Kathy and Trina to this day. Um I'm still really close to their families. I see them whenever I can. Trina lives in Thailand now. Um, she did leave live in Bangladesh, but she lost her job when the Trump administration uh destroyed USAID. She worked in foreign aid. David, who is living with us now, lives in Hong Kong. He's a reporter for uh Bloomberg. My uh Kathy lives in the States and I live in the UK. Kathy and I are both novelists now. Kathy writes novels as well. And that, you know, that's the friendship of my life.

SPEAKER_00 21:21

Yeah. It's incredible that you've ended up so spread out across the world, but that you've maintained the friendship.

SPEAKER_01 21:31

Yeah. I guess Yeah, and every time we see each other, it's like we haven't been apart at all.

SPEAKER_00 21:37

Do you how often do you see each other?

SPEAKER_01 21:41

It depends. So I try to see um Trina and Kathy every summer, but I don't always manage it. This year I've managed to see Kathy a few times um because there have been various funerals involved, um, sadly. So I have seen her more. And you know, we have a WhatsApp group. I think Trina and David see each other more often because they're both in Asia. Yeah. So it's easy for them to travel to see each other. But yeah, I see them whenever I can. And it is amazing how nothing changes at all.

SPEAKER_00 22:14

Yeah, those old friendships are like that, aren't they? You can just kind of dip in and out of them. And I think also with social media these days, you feel like even if you haven't directly spoken, you feel like you you know, you know what's what they're up to, you've got updates on their family, their children, and um so you've you feel very connected to people, I think. Um okay, so could you do you remember much about what sort of thing you were wearing back then?

SPEAKER_01 22:53

Do you know I well I believe I was wearing pretty much the same thing that I'm wearing now. So I believe that I wore a lot of jeans and big jumpers and huge t-shirts, sweatshirts, rolled up trousers, um, with the socks showing, uh trainers. It was before I bought my first pair of Doc Martins, so I always would have been wearing trainers, I think. Um I had short hair. Um it was not dyed any strange color at that point. Um I don't think it was. It might have been bright red, um, because I got into dyeing my hair, you know, from the age of 17 onwards, 16 onwards. I always had different color hair. Um and I hardly ever wore makeup. I know that. Because God, the youthful skin. Yeah, you didn't knew that we had Laura.

SPEAKER_00 23:59

And we didn't know, we didn't know we had it until it was gone.

SPEAKER_01 24:04

I know. We were all like, oh, I have a spot, oh I have a spot, and then we didn't see all that beautiful collagen that we had. It was so gorgeous.

SPEAKER_00 24:12

I did my daughter's nine, and I just squeeze her cheeks and just I'm like, oh, look at your cheeks, they're so beautiful. Yeah, she's like, just my face.

SPEAKER_01 24:22

Yeah. So I was not, I was not all that interested in clothes to be honest. I was um more of a little bit tomboy-ish. Can I say tomboyish? Was I tomboyish? I was queer and I didn't know it.

SPEAKER_00 24:36

I was going to ask about that to say because I know that about you, and I wondered, was there any kind of romance in your life at this time? And did you know that you were queer? But you've just said no, you didn't.

SPEAKER_01 24:50

I don't think I knew that I was queer as such. I knew it was different from a lot of people, but the thing is, I was Jewish and I was smart and I was creative, um, and that made me different anyway. So I don't, and I and I felt a sort of feminism sort of burgeoning at this point that I that I didn't understand. Um, and I think there was a huge amount where I grew up, there was a lot of internalized homophobia and also a lot of internalized misogyny. Laura, in the 90s, there was so much internalized misogyny. I mean, it's it's insane how much there was. Um, and we didn't notice it. You know, it was the air that we swam, the that we breathed in the sea that we swam in, yeah. Um, and internalized homophobia as well. Um, so no, I don't think I realized it consciously, but I did know that I was different from most people in my school.

SPEAKER_00 25:38

Right.

SPEAKER_01 25:39

Um, my romantic relationships were all with boys, although, as I said, I had this really, really, really intense friendship with my two best female friends. Like we did everything together, and we were incredibly involved in each other's lives. And Kathy and I used to write um books together where we would like I would always write the bits, and they would they would be about us. So in the summer of 1990, we were writing what we called the vampire book, where um we would this is how we never went out and spent any money. We just sat, counted our coins, and wrote this vampire book. And it was about this uh band who were all vampires. Um, and it was led by Michael Hutchins, because Michael Hutchins was still alive then. Yeah. And there were some other people in it. The the drummer was Duff, um, who is the drummer, was the drummer of Guns N' Roses. Okay. And he was the only person who wasn't a vampire in the band. He had no idea. He just thought everybody liked to sleep during the day and didn't eat very much. So, so and we wrote this book, the story about us, me and Kathy, um, having relationships with this band and sort of finding out that they were vampires and all of this. And I think I don't know if we're our own band. Anyway, it was a self-insert sort of fan fiction type thing. Um, it was super fun. And what we did was what we did all the way through high school, which is that I would write the parts about Kathy and her love interest, all those sex scenes, and she would write all the parts about me and my love interest, all those sex scenes. And I can't remember who had Michael Hutchins out of the two of us. Maybe we both had him, I can't remember. Anyway, we um and and that was, you know, we were writing erotic stories about each other, essentially. Um, which Kathy and I have agreed is a, you know, pretty closely points to some sort of queerness in our in our lives.

SPEAKER_00 27:51

Um But also I can see how that would happen because it would be at that age you might feel that you couldn't write those scenes about yourself, but it's easier to write them about somebody else.

SPEAKER_01 28:03

Also, you had an audience, like a built-in audience, and and so I could write something for her and I could give it to her, and she would really enjoy it, and she could write it to me, and I could give it to her, you know, give it to me, and I would really enjoy it. So we had we're giving these gifts to each other. And the the internet didn't exist in 1990, obviously. So fan fiction was not a thing. Yeah, you couldn't go and read it or share it in that way. Um, so we were just, you know, it was an audience of two. We just loved it.

SPEAKER_00 28:32

So you were already a writer, and did you already know that that's what you wanted to do as a career?

SPEAKER_01 28:39

Yes, but I had no idea how to do it. Is that the same for you?

SPEAKER_00 28:44

Um yeah, I suppose so. There was um do you know Alan Garner, the author Alan Garner? Um, he lived in or just outside the village that I lived in. And when I was a brownie, so I was like seven or eight, I already wanted to be a writer, and we went to Alan Garner's house, me and my mum, because um his wife was used to do different badges at Brownies, Brownies is like um you know, cubs, that kind of thing. Um, and I was doing the reading badge, and she for some reason was the person who you had to go and show what you'd done, and she said whether you got the badge or not. And I remember saying to my mum, can you ask if we can meet Alan Garner? And and I didn't, but I didn't read his books, I hadn't read his books, I just knew he was a novelist. And my mum was like, No, no, no, we can't disturb him, he'll be too busy. Um, so that just came to mind because we know, we know what writers' days are like. Um, yeah, it was just like I was always in the library, and like I'd see leaflets for poetry competitions or short story competitions, but I was doing that kind of trying to find that stuff out on my own, whereas I I'm always very conscious, and I don't know how much it's just that times have changed, and obviously the internet makes everything much more accessible. But if either of my children ever say to me, Oh, I'd quite like to do this, I'm straight on there, like, oh, how do we do this? How do we work this out? But nobody was really, even though I told my parents I wanted to be a writer, they weren't really out there looking for opportunities for me. Um, and I didn't know how to do it. I I did an English degree and then I later did a creative writing MA, but um it is it does feel a bit like a locked away room, and it's not the kind of I'm sure it feels the same if you want to be an actress or a musician. You don't it's not an ordinary thing and it's hard to know how to get there. And you and all you need to do at that age is just write, isn't it? Because all you need to do is get better, read and write, but you sort of feel like there's more you should be doing, I think.

SPEAKER_01 31:04

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 31:05

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_01 31:06

Yeah, and I always said I wanted to be a writer when I was a when I was younger. I'm not sure in 1990 that I wanted to be a writer. Maybe I did. Um I was getting a degree in English, and yeah, I do actually think that I wanted to be a writer. Yes. Yeah. So where was your But I had no idea how to go about it.

SPEAKER_00 31:28

No. But we both got there. Both made it. Where which uh American university were you at?

SPEAKER_01 31:37

I was at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

SPEAKER_00 31:40

Okay, and then you did a year as part of your undergraduate degree at Cambridge. And then did you just stay in the UK then or did you go back?

SPEAKER_01 31:52

I came back um and I finished my undergraduate degree at Brown because um degrees in the UK, BAs in the UK are four in the US, sorry, are four years rather than three.

SPEAKER_00 32:03

Right.

SPEAKER_01 32:04

But because I had done uh my third year at Cambridge and only studied English for a year, I had fulfilled all my requirements um to get my degree in English. So I just had to take classes, I didn't have to take any more English classes that last year. Um so the last year of university, I concentrated on taking classes that I really wanted to take. So I took I took creative writing and that was useless, absolutely useless. Um but I did take a class that changed my life, which was the um theory of the tea theory and practice of the teaching of writing, um, which trained me to be a peer writing coach at with university students helping them write. So I think I was doing a lot of the stuff that uh in a peer way that royal literary fellows do here in UK universities. That is, I was just I was just looking at people's writing and helping them with their writing and their planning and and um drafting and redrafting, not looking at the substance of what they were writing, just how they constructed their arguments and and and all of that. Um and that was probably one of the most formative classes I ever took. But I ended up I took that in 1991 and 1992, and then I act I worked as a writing coach at the university, and that what a great program. Absolutely amazing. It helped me become a better writer, and through that I could help lots of other students become better writers.

SPEAKER_00 33:34

Yeah, that's it's so interesting what you say about um not needing to do any more English modules units when you got back to the US because college in the US is a much wider thing, isn't it? You you study a range of subjects, whereas here we just hone in on one thing usually, unless oh, you could do joint honours and do two things. But people in the States, from what I understand from reading and films and things, are are studying a whole range of things while they're getting their degree. And maybe that's why it's an extra year.

SPEAKER_01 34:07

You are well, yeah. I have a degree, I don't have a degree in English, I have a degree in liberal arts with honours in English.

SPEAKER_00 34:13

Okay. Yes. Okay, interesting. Um, so just to go back to that summer then, um what do you remember in uh in terms of books and music and films? Uh it doesn't sound like a TV film summer, really, because of the travelling, but um, do you is there certain music that you associate with that year? You've mentioned Guns N' Roses. Were you a Guns N' Roses fan?

SPEAKER_01 34:41

Do you know I was not before that summer started, but by the end of that summer, yes, I was, which was sort of funny. Um, so we would listen to Guns N' Roses. I think our big Guns N' Roses summer was probably the next summer, but um but uh yes, I was I uh what I really remember, and I looked at the list before this podcast, I looked at the list of Billboard's top 100 singles for 1990, and what we would do that summer is that we had the TV on all the time, but we weren't watching TV, we just had it tuned to MTV. Right now, MTV was a new thing in 1990, right? It was cool, um, and because obviously there was no streaming, um, and that's MTV and the radio was how you were gonna hear new music, and so I just remember watching MTV for hours and watching all these videos for you know Paula Abdul and Technotronic and Janet Jackson and uh oh god, Billy Joel, and a lot by Phil Collins. Apparently, Phil Collins had four things in the in the top 100 Billbourne chart that year, which you know, why? We were just completely insane. Phil Collins is a fine musician, but four?

SPEAKER_00 36:08

And Janet Jackson had one. I had no idea that Phil Collins broke the U the US because you never really know, like he was very big, and the and my mum was a big Phil Collins fan, but um you know you people talk over here about breaking America, and you know, a lot of bands that are huge here never manage it, so I never really know what what's involved in that. But Phil Collins, he was he was uh doing his thing in America.

SPEAKER_01 36:37

Oh yeah, oh yeah, you couldn't get away from Phil Collins. Yeah. I was not really a big fan. No, but I loved you know uh Madonna, um yeah, in excess, all of them, but they always it was great, it's great music. Oh, and that might have been the summer we went to see Motley Crue in concert. I'm not sure if it was or not, but it might have been summer we see.

SPEAKER_00 37:02

So quite a wide range of musical influence there, quite like pop pop rock. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:11

Did you have posters on your bedroom wall and who was on them if you did?

SPEAKER_01 37:18

So I was a strange child, and my teenage idol was Paul McCartney from the Beatles. I loved him. Um, I wanted to marry him and to be Mrs. McCartney. And uh so I had posters of the Beatles on my wall, like absolutely insane amounts of posters of the Beatles. And um, Kathy and I wrote books about us and the Beatles as well. I got Paul and she got George. So um, you know, never mind that these guys were like old enough to be our grandfathers, whatever. So um we we um I had posters of him, and then also I was obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, so I had a very large picture of Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, black and white, because I would watch those films incessantly when I was in school. Um, and so I had that on my wall as well. It was all Paul McCartney, it was all old white men. What is up with that?

SPEAKER_00 38:17

Do you still like the Beatles now? Their music?

SPEAKER_01 38:21

Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah, I mean, what's not to like, yes. Yeah. Although I think my favorite Beatles sort of shifted from Paul to George as I got older. Um, but yeah.

unknown 38:34

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 38:34

I was always, it was it was always like non-sexual men, you know, like men that I couldn't that were just so out of my age range that why would I even have a crush on them? Maybe that should have been a sign.

SPEAKER_00 38:51

A clue that I was like, I don't know. Maybe it was that they were safe and and like you say, non-sexual.

SPEAKER_01 38:58

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:00

It's um interesting to look back and decode these strange things we did as children and teenagers. Um, I'm gonna do a little quiz with you, but just before I do, um, would you go back to that summer if you could?

SPEAKER_01 39:18

You know, in general, I would never go back. Um, I think that I've learned so much and I'm a different person than I was then, and I would never want to go back there. And I remember my 20s as an experimental time and a fun time and a time that I learned a lot, but it was also a turbulent time and a time when I had a lot less self-belief and a lot less understanding of my own of myself on so many levels. So, in general, I wouldn't want to go back to that. But that trip was really fun, Laura. That was really fun. We just had, we were just so lighthearted, and we had the responsibility of grown-ups, you know, we were working full-time, sometimes more than full-time. We were paying our own way, we had a car, we were driving across the country, you know, we were responsible for all of our own food and and lodging and everything, and yet we were kids.

SPEAKER_00 40:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:17

You know, we didn't have to worry about taxes or paying the mortgage, we were staying in the parents' house. The parents weren't there, but we were in that house. We didn't have to worry about the jobs, we were not real jobs, so who cared if we hated them? You know, you just go home. So there was that we were on the cusp of something. Um, everything was changing, and and as you said, the world was changing too, you know. Um, and in a lot of ways, we felt in those days that the world was changing for the better. Um, that's an interesting way to look back at it now, uh, all these years later, 36 years later, because the world has changed a lot since then. Yeah, but there was an optimism, which I would love to have again, yeah. And a spirit of adventure and autonomy, which I would love to have again.

SPEAKER_00 41:06

Okay, I like that answer. That's uh that's really interesting. So, okay, I've just got five questions for you, and because I know you're in America, um, they are all America-based. So, number one, which classic Christmas film starring a nine-year-old boy came out in 1990.

SPEAKER_01 41:29

No way, it wasn't Home Alone, was it? Yeah. No way! Oh my god, I have never seen that film. What? I know, I've never seen it.

SPEAKER_00 41:40

That is unbelievable because you have a child as well, don't you? How have you not seen it with your child?

SPEAKER_01 41:47

Uh, they've seen it, they saw it at school, but I've never seen it here.

unknown 41:51

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 41:52

No, and it has a lot of actors who I really like in it. I mean, it's got Catherine O'Hara in it, who is just a legend.

SPEAKER_00 41:59

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:00

R.I.P.

SPEAKER_00 42:01

Yeah. No, it's a it's a classic. I think next Christmas you should make that your mission. Uh well done for getting means.

SPEAKER_01 42:09

I was 20. I didn't care about that.

SPEAKER_00 42:10

No, I suppose that I mean I so I was 10 in 1990. I didn't see it at the cinema, but I probably saw it, you know, once it was on TV. Although it took it used to take years for things to come on TV after they were out in the cinema.

SPEAKER_01 42:24

Not like now with PCR.

SPEAKER_00 42:27

Yeah, yeah. Uh okay, well done. Number two, which American tennis player won his first US Open that year?

SPEAKER_01 42:36

Oh, I don't know. I never follow sports, I have no clue. It wasn't John McEnroe. That's the only American tennis player I know.

SPEAKER_00 42:42

Okay, it was Pete Sampras.

SPEAKER_01 42:45

Yeah, don't even I don't even know what he looks like. Was he blonde?

SPEAKER_00 42:49

No, he was dark.

SPEAKER_01 42:51

Oh, no, no clue.

SPEAKER_00 42:53

Okay, not sporty. Uh number three, which animated series that's still running today launched in 1990?

SPEAKER_01 43:03

Seriously, The Simpsons?

SPEAKER_00 43:04

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 43:05

Launched in 1990? I do remember when that launched because we used to watch it. We used to watch it like when it was on TV. It was on like at eight o'clock on a certain time, and we would watch it, you know, you there was no catch-up TV, and we would all gather around and watch it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:21

Yeah. Okay. Uh, number four, which film starred Julia Roberts in her breakout role?

SPEAKER_01 43:29

Pretty Woman was that year too?

SPEAKER_00 43:31

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 43:34

Wow. Wow. I saw that in the cinema. Um, and I remember that. And God, why did I not have a poster of Julia Roberts up on the I mean that's insane.

SPEAKER_00 43:47

I can picture that poster though, can you? That like the front cover of the film with her like standing side on the boots. With the boots, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:55

Yeah. And the boots and the pink writing. Yeah. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 43:58

Uh that was a very

SPEAKER_01 44:00

problematic film for like I was watching it when I was 13 or something and uh not probably not really knowing what prostitution was but there we go right right oh yeah it was a problematic film it is it is but Julia Roberts in that film I mean my god what a beauty what a talent she was just amazing yeah just lit up a room yeah and then she was in the right Richard Beer was not yeah yeah oh there she was in everything yeah yeah and she lit up the room in most of those things too when the when the movie wasn't very good um I watched her in Eat Slay Love for Eat Prey Love sorry I watched her in Eat Prey Love when I was writing Eat Slay Love because I figured that I really should watch it and my god what a terrible movie it is a terrible movie she is so great I haven't seen it but I think she rescues most of it doesn't she she can she can carry a film on her own yeah yeah okay and last one which baggy trousered musician had the year's biggest album staying at number one for 21 weeks baggy trousered so it wasn't Phil Collins no um which you know I would have thought um baggy trousered I think rap I mean was it was it MC Hammer was it you can't touch this it was yeah yeah so that was all over but here it was really only one song wasn't it yes and I have an interest I have a little anecdote about MC Hammer so I was uh 11 and I won a competition uh I won MC Hammer tickets um and my parents said that I wasn't allowed to go with a friend because I was 11 and it was at a massive arena it was at Birmingham NEC and so they said that either one of them would come with me or I had to persuade my older sister to go with me and she really didn't want to but I talked her into it because I didn't want to go with one of my parents and we went to the concert and people had inflatable hammers a lot of people and he sang five songs and that included singing You Can't Touch This twice because he really didn't have any other songs that was my first live music experience yeah wow but he had it all I mean that was a good song and he had those yellow trousers I can still picture him very very clearly he was both a fashion and a pop icon icon I think he became uh a pastor did he I hope I haven't made that up I'm sure I I'm sure I've got that from somewhere I'm gonna look him up as soon as we're finished find out what happened to MC Hammer oh yeah that was that was played on MTV all the time that Take on Me by Aha although that wasn't I don't know if that was later um oh that had that great video with the drawing didn't it and he came out with the drawing so good that might have been a little bit earlier but that that video and I remember Paula Abdul videos where she was just dancing what was the one that she did with the cat there was like an animated cat was it called Opposites Attract maybe oh yeah that's a song yeah yeah was it with an animated cat I don't know who I I think it was like a duet with a with some guy and in the video the guy was a cat. I'm gonna watch that as well I'm gonna spend the rest of the day in 1990 looking at uh some great music there um with the is it um Philomena Kunk one of her programs which one is it Kunk on Earth every now and then she goes to the video for Pump Up the Jam by Technotronic I was watching it with my kid and I was like oh my god oh my god I remember this song we all love this song we would just dance to it all the time and my and my kid is like oh my god you're just so sad they don't understand okay well well done Julie you got four out of five and um you only didn't get the fifth because you're not a sports person so that's okay I just felt like I couldn't do all music and film I felt like we needed to have a throw some sport in there but I don't blame you for not getting that one right so um thank you very much for coming on and talking to me about the summer of 1990.

SPEAKER_00 48:54

It's been really fun thank you it has been really fun at Memory Lane thank you so much for listening to today's episode of That Summer. I'm Laura Pearson and you can find me on Instagram at LauraPAuther and at ThatSummerpod. And if you're hungry for more please check out my novel What Happened That Summer see you next time