Interview with Natalie Alder, author of Waiting On A Friend

This week we're bringing you an exclusive interview with the wonderful Natalie Adler, author of Waiting On A Friend, one of our June Well Read Women subscription picks.

Waiting On A Friend is Natalie's stunning debut novel, a story following a young lesbian living in New York City in 1984, as the AIDS crisis began to take hold of the city. She has the ability to see ghosts, and more than anything, she longs to see her friend Mark again. But Mark doesn't come through. Hence the title.

Natalie opens up about why she chose to set her story in this devastating time in queer history, a nod to her extraordinary aunt, the importance of friendship and community and some of her all-time favourite reads.

Make sure you follow us for more author interviews with some of the women behind our fabulous subscription picks coming soon 📚

To find out more about Well Read Women and our subscription, visit our website at www.wellreadwomen.co.uk

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Service dedicated to spotlighting new and established female authors. Each month, our team of passionate bookworms pick six books from the buziest new releases to underrated backlist gems to bring readers books we believe deserve a permanent spot on their shelf. Today we're bringing you an exclusive interview with the wonderful Natalie Adler, author of Waiting on a Friend, which was one of our June subscription picks, and what a month it was, with 88% of our subscribers choosing a hardback selection, and Waiting on a Friend was joint top for the most popular pick of the month. Waiting on a Friend is a debut novel following a young lesbian living in New York City in 1984 as the AIDS epidemic begins in the city. She has an ability to see ghosts and longs to see her friend Mark who passed with AIDS but he doesn't come through, hence the title Waiting on a Friend. Natalie spoke to us all about why she decided to write a novel in this specific period of queer history, and not to her incredible aunt, the importance of Chosen Family and some of her favourite books. We hope you love this interview just as much as we do, and remember to hit follow or subscribe wherever you're listening for more exclusive author interviews coming very soon. Hi Natalie and welcome to the Wellread Women podcast. We are absolutely thrilled to be able to chat to you today all about your debut novel, Waiting on a Friend, which is one of our June subscription selections.

SPEAKER_01 1:17

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It's I'm so excited to bring this book across the pond, so to speak. So thank you.

SPEAKER_00 1:25

I'm so excited to chat to you today, Natalie, about Waiting on a Friend, which is your debut novel, but it's also one of our well-read women subscription picks for Dune. And it follows Renata, a lesbian living in New York's East Village in 1984 during the AIDS crisis. And she's navigating grief, rage, love, and the power of friendship during this difficult period, but she also has an ability to see ghosts. And I wanted to ask what sparked the idea for this story.

SPEAKER_01 1:54

So I, you know, I've had the story in me for a long time. I thought about it for about two years before I sat down to write. And I knew that I wanted to do a story about changing New York City. I knew I wanted to do a story about the AIDS crisis, about the ways in which a city changes over time in ways that people might think are natural, but actually rather deliberate and planned and like a little bit more sinister. And ghosts to me were a really intuitive way to combine these threads that when you are in a densely packed city, um, whether it's New York or Edinburgh or London, you know, you have this feeling of everyone who came before you almost in like a material, physical way. Like you could you could just reach out and touch it. And sometimes, you know, it doesn't even matter whether or not you believe in ghosts or anything, but sometimes it feels like someone was just like there, like around the corner that you could you could just see that past happening like out of the corner of your eye. So like I do think that this is one of the beautiful things about cities is that it forces everyone to live in close contact and also like in close contact with our own histories. And it ghosts are kind of like a material reminder of that. And ghosts also show up in fiction whenever you know there's an injustice that's been buried. And our experience of the AIDS crisis was an enormous injustice. It was socially, culturally, politically repressed in so many ways, and these people were uncared for. So I think that it was really important to me to show those who had passed from the AIDS crisis is still present in the city and still imposing their presence. And I wanted them to be part of this narrative of how the city was changing because their loss shaped the big cities of the world.

SPEAKER_00 3:31

So waiting on a friend is a beautiful exploration of the devastation of the AIDS crisis with this really relatable, grieving character at the center. But I wanted to ask what made you want to tell a story set during this specific period and why did you choose to weave supernatural elements like Renata's ability to see ghosts into it?

SPEAKER_01 3:52

So I wanted to write about the AIDS crisis in part because I think the history is as tragic as it is interesting. Because it is interesting to understand that there were people who fought desperately for their own lives, and there were people who loved them who fought alongside them. It can't be overstated how abandoned people with AIDS were by governments everywhere. I was really happy when It's a Sin came out in the UK. I was like, how wonderful it is that, you know, like such like this, like such a beautiful mainstream outlet for like looking at these stories and really reminding people, like, no, like people were quite abandoned, you know, and it was really just like groups of friends that came together to care for one another. Because largely, largely families abandoned their kin, you know, religions abandoned their their people, governments, the medical establishment to some extent. So I wanted to remember that. And as much as I wanted to remember that, I wanted to remember what the role that friendship played in in caretaking, in honoring memory and holding space and all of these things. And I was in part inspired by the story of my aunt who became a hospice nurse in 1987 after her best friend died of AIDS. And she was so aghast at how he wasn't cared for, uh the conditions in the hospital where he died, its family who abandoned him. She was so moved by that that she changed her life. You know, she went to nursing school, she changed her career, she was 30 years old, you know, she had a good job, she didn't have to do that, she didn't have to change her life, but she was so unable to be a bystander to like let that go. The novel is not really about her, it's not really about her story, but her story is absolutely in there. It was inspired by people like her who saw something happening and were unable to say, I'm just gonna let this go, or like, oh, how horrible, and then move on to the next thing. So I wanted to honor people like her. I wanted to honor those who we had lost, but mostly I just wanted to honor friendship and that there are communities of care that are outside of institutional forces like the government, the church, the family that show up for one another. So that's what the that's what I wanted to incorporate into the novel.

SPEAKER_00 6:01

Wow, that is such an incredible story. Your aunt sounds like an amazing person. She was.

SPEAKER_01 6:07

She truly was. Yeah, she was in a biker gang, she was really cool. Yeah, she was in Florida, it was a whole other thing. So very cool.

SPEAKER_00 6:14

One of the things I really loved about waiting on a friend was the way that you captured the importance of friendship back then and just how core having a community was during that specific period and navigating so much loss at such a young age to something so devastating. And when you spoke about It's a Sin there, it did actually come to mind when I was reading Waiting on a Friend because that is one of the most impactful TV shows I've ever watched, especially about the AIDS epidemic. It was so moving, and not to give spoilers away, but there is one character, Colin, and the way that his storyline goes had me absolutely bawling at the TV. It was so emotional, and I think it really captured the cruelty of the AIDS epidemic and the young lives that it robbed people of.

SPEAKER_01 7:03

Colin, the first friend, the one who died at the he worked at the DRC store.

SPEAKER_00 7:07

Yeah, Colin was the boy that worked in, I think it was a tailing store. I'm not quite sure, but he out of all the friend groups seemed like the most serious one who wanted to get ahead and get promoted and had his job and took pride in his job. And I think when you see how his storyline unfolds and how devastating it is, and that scene where he's at hospital on his own and it's just him in his bed and no one's around him, and people are going in and out with masks, and it was just so devastating and lonely. And that will be something that stays with me forever, just how young he was and how much he wanted to achieve and how that was cut short.

SPEAKER_01 7:45

Yeah, to to know that there really wasn't a cure, and there wasn't even like a good treatment. There's not a good treatment until 1996. So we're talking between 80, between the first like acknowledged cases, which I think happened in the United States and in and in France. So in our CDC or Center for Disease Control, like that report first comes out in 1981, though AIDS had been circulating in different, you know, like marginalized communities before that in the UK soon after, and you know, global, very soon on those heels, right? So they're we're thinking like 15 years where there's not a single effective treatment. And if anybody survived, it was simply chance that they did.

SPEAKER_00 8:23

So I really wanted to chat to you about Renata, who is our main character, and she feels so lifelike and relatable. She's navigating grief, she has a lot of trauma, and this is a really difficult period in her life, and she also has her ability to see goals where she's waiting for Mark to come through. I wanted to ask, what did you enjoy most about building her character?

SPEAKER_01 8:47

I love that question because I love her so much. I wish I could say I was like her, but not not quite. She's more like who I wish I was. She's so cool. She's, you know, she's grieving her best friend. This isn't a spoiler. This you find this out relatively soon, but her mother has also died some years before. She really feels pretty alone in the world. Her best friend was her strongest kid feeling of kinship, I guess you could say. And her friends are enormously important to her. And I think that in developing her character, I really wanted her to be somebody who was feeling things deeply, but couldn't always got in her own way. You know, like I like fiction about characters who make mistakes, who their problems cause problems for others, you know, because that's what human beings are like, you know. I knew that I wanted her politics to be like really quite left and really, you know, quite progressive. But to do that, nobody wants to read like a sanctimonious novel about, you know, a didactic lesbian telling you about the way things are supposed to be, right? So she had to make some pretty like significant mistakes in the book, and mistakes that she makes because she's grieving, and grief makes us all like a little bit selfish, even if we don't intend to be. There's a certain kind of like myopia that happens when you're grieving. And that's her problem, is that she can't quite see outside of it and she can't really believe that it's happening to her. She's 29, her best friend dies at 29. Like all these people are dying really young. Her mother died young too. So it's kind of like she can't believe this is happening because she's she's saying to herself, I'm just supposed to live the rest of my life like this. Like, does it end? So she's relatable in that I think that like grief is really hits us all like I I didn't see it coming, even if it's, you know, coming like a truck at you slowly a mile away, you know. So I knew that I wanted her to be messy and I wanted her to be raw in her grief. But I also wanted her to be like funny and having a good time because I think that like when you're writing historical fiction, you might think the AIDS crisis was tragic. And so this novel needs to have this mournful tone the whole time. But I really wanted to make it so that they kind of reminded me of like me and and my friends and how we might, you know, go through something and still grieve and still have a party and still gossip, you know, and like do all of these kinds of things and still have to go to work too. So I wanted, I thought that that would be the way to kind of balance the tone of the mournfulness, but also the these people are very alive in ways that we don't we don't even really get to be so much now.

SPEAKER_00 10:58

And that's the thing about grief. You never really know how it's going to affect you until it happens. And it's strange how you can have this huge loss in your life and yet the world keeps going. And I think you did a really good job of making Renata so lifelike in the way that she was dealing with her grief and unpacking her trauma while also trying to live life as normal as possible. And it kind of brings me on to my next question, which is about the significance of the title, Waiting on a Friend. So throughout the novel, we know that Mark's absence is a huge part of Renata's grief. She's hoping to see him, she's hoping that he comes to her as a ghost and they manage to see one another one more time. And I wanted to ask, was Mark's absence always going to be the central part of the story, or did that happen as it evolved?

SPEAKER_01 11:44

Always the central thing. That was the the kind of the premise that I had from the beginning. Like first, you know, I had this idea of like these topics I was kind of interested in, the milieu I was interested in. I knew I wanted to write a novel about a group of friends. But mostly I wanted to write about, I guess I I I I wanted to write about thwarted our our kind of thwarted wishes and our desires, you know, being unrealized in some ways. Like, so I knew that I wanted to have a character who would see ghosts and that the story would be told by somebody who could see them. But that what she wanted most of all is to see her friend who once he's once he's died, she assumes she's gonna see his ghost and doesn't. I think once that clicked for me, that that was gonna be the central tension of the book, that thwarted desire kind of motivated the rest of the thought from there. And the the first line of the book was actually the first sentence that I wrote in this book, which gave me a vehicle to keep going. The first line is something like, When Mark died, I thought I'd see him around more. Once I had that down, which I thought about for I don't know, like two years, then I had that down and then I could I could take off from there.

SPEAKER_00 12:44

That's so cool that it was just that first line that's always stuck with you after all that time.

SPEAKER_01 12:49

I know. It's never gonna happen to me again.

SPEAKER_00 12:53

Actually, you never know. It could actually happen again. Who knows? But I wanted to ask you actually about that first line. So if you had that for so many years, how long did it take you from writing that first initial line all the way to your final draft?

SPEAKER_01 13:08

I would say final draft, I'd say about five years, five or six years. Um, and that that core through line stayed the same throughout the entire drafting process. Um, the antagonists of the novel who are kind of shadowy small business who are promising to rid the neighborhood of any kind of like uncomfortable spiritual material, which basically just means they're incarcerating ghosts. I knew that I kind of wanted them to be the antagonists pretty soon because I was like, well, what's what's like a who who who antagonizes ghosts? You know, like who who's got it out for them? So those things I knew I wanted, I think Bianca was the first friend who showed up, and maybe Star came because Bianca is, you know, Bianca is a trans character, and trans women have friends who are trans women. So Star showed up on Bianca's heels like really quickly. Julie, who's a a housing lawyer and probably the the most like political voice of the novel, she showed up pretty soon. And then like the cast just kind of started as I as I went. So I think that it about five years of making sure like the tone and the emotional through line worked right, that the logistics, that the ghost logistics, you know, were steady the whole time. Because you have to set up your own world with its own rules, and that the tensions in the novel, I guess, were sort of like coming from Renata herself, that this is about her grief and the ways in which she got in her own way. So it took a lot of time to kind of smooth those things out.

SPEAKER_00 14:26

So the book is set in New York, and I wanted to ask how important was it for you to make sure that it was set in the city?

SPEAKER_01 14:33

It was important because I started it during the pandemic. I was living in New York, still am. And, you know, we were in in lockdown and it was it was quite intense. It was a very, very intense time. New York was hit really hard. You know, famously we had freezer trucks um outside of hospitals. And I think another thing that really, you know, shaped things for me is that I lived in an apartment building on the 10th floor and I would look out the window. I was living in Brooklyn and I could kind of see the Manhattan skyline. And I just missed the city that I was in, which is a weird feeling. And I think it had to be New York. I know that there's no dearth of movies, books, you know, TV about New York City, which I'm like, great. I love New York. There should be. Not everything needs to be, not every other rom-com needs to be said there. New York doesn't have to be the third character in every story, but like this one, it's so, it's so readily had to be for me. So it was my own like longing and grief for the city that I was in.

SPEAKER_00 15:25

That's the thing about the COVID pandemic. I know it's not really comparable to the AIDS epidemic, but it does really show you the weight and gravity of these, you know, sort of epidemics, pandemics, and how they do destroy communities. Even when you think of the pandemic, you know someone who has had family be affected, or maybe know someone who's passed away, or whose lives are totally different now, even though they are completely separate things. I think it is one of those examples of how much something that came along and no one really had an explanation for really tore apart communities, families, people's lives.

SPEAKER_01 16:02

Yeah. And I think the fact that, you know, early on, we really didn't know, you know, like we're in the park and cloth mat, you know. Like I think about that a lot. Like we really didn't totally know exactly how it was spreading and what the best ways to stay safe were. I think my mom probably lysoled groceries for like a long time after that, which was quite similar to the early years of the AIDS crisis because people didn't really know exactly how it was spread. But even though that's true, there were also some like pretty like cruel, cruel, like kind of like government missteps. Like the earliest name for AIDS was grid, gay-related immunodeficiency, which it's not possible to have an immune problem that is related to being gay. And scientists knew that then. You we know that, but like the the kind of cruelty was the point there. And these were the sort of key differences is that when COVID happened, now, regardless of like everything that happened, vaccines and on, and like when people got sick of the lockdown and on, there was a time where the whole world shut down. And I think what's hard for Renata and her friends is that they are going through this incredibly ghastly um epidemic and the world isn't shutting down, even though their world has in a way. That dissonance was really, really powerful. And I wanted to explore that. Like, how is everybody else not freaked out? How is everybody else going through the world not caring or knowing about this?

SPEAKER_00 17:10

And that's what I think you did such a good job of was really shining a light on how the community had to come together. And I was actually thinking about this while I was reading it, that there was no social media back then. So when you think about people trying to spread awareness and, you know, better inform people, it was very limited to other than people in the community or people who know people who were affected. And when you look at the newspaper headlines from back then, the gross misinformation was just awful. Yeah. Um, but there was one thing I wanted to touch on, and that is the paranormal exterminators who are at the center of the novel who are trying to get rid of ghosts. It felt like a real powerful reflection of erasure and trying to push people out of communities. And I wanted to ask, was that something that you were always thinking about from the beginning while writing the novel?

SPEAKER_01 18:00

Oh, I mean, you hit the nail on the head, absolutely. In this particular era of New York, you know, the East Village, the Hilberry side, these were really creative, exciting places to be. This is where like punk rock uh on the on the state side is born, you know, this is where Yet Herring is is making art. This is where hip hop is um starting to come down from the Bronx and like meld with kind of like no-wave music. And like there's just like an exciting moment, right? And of course, you know, the sort of like art vultures are starting to come circling around. But also, New York City had been declared bankrupt in the late 70s. We had um this phenomenon called white flight, where the sort of like white middle to upper class are like leaving the cities in droves because they're all racism and they think it's unsafe. And finance is starting to heat up in New York. Reagan, Thatcher are really like doing what they can to deregulate everything and make big business king. Money is starting to flow in, but not to the right people, I guess. You know, like finance is starting to happen. So these neighborhoods are starting to change, and and that's what I mean by like unnatural ways, kind of, you know, it's not, you know, one immigration group comes, does well for itself, moves out, and another moves in, which is kind of like the more like typical ecosystem for New York City. This is like very deliberate. And when neighborhoods change over like that, a lot of times there are people who want to get older residents out, specifically because they can raise the rent, they can pretend to renovate a little bit. And I wanted, if there were gonna be ghosts in the book, I wanted them to be threatened in some way in a way I could think about as well, people, the people who are moving in are gonna be uncomfortable with this history. They're gonna be uncomfortable, they're gonna want to sanitize New York with like cool stuff, but like not necessarily remnants of the past that disturb them. So they don't want to think about this was a queer neighborhood or like this was an immigrant neighborhood. It was a neighborhood that had poverty or drug use or things like that. Like, wipe it clean, just have like, you know, your fun downtown experience. So I knew that there needed to be some force that was gonna like cleanse. I've chosen a Manhattan remediation for this group because I wanted it to sound a little vague. Like I wanted it to be like people weren't like, I'm I think I know what I'm doing, but like I'm not quite sure. They do something, but now I feel better, right? So kind of like removing and containing what they consider to be, you know, kind of like dangerous substances, psychical, residual, supernatural substances. But really, all they're doing is they're they're incarcerating the ghosts and they're putting them in a warehouse. And that's spoilers if they happen halfway through the book. Oh well. And she finds out in the worst possible way, we'll say. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:17

Yeah, and that's the thing about cities, everybody sees it as this almost like glamorous cosmopolitan place to stay. But cities are only really what they are today because of the people who lived there before them and the history that it's got. And even when you think of 9-11 and how much that changed New York, it's like you can't just erase history like that that totally shapes and changes a city and something different. And I think when I think of waiting on a friend, it's something that you captured so well. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 20:49

Thank you for thank you for noticing that. I mean, I have grew up in a suburb of New York, kind of watched it change from afar. My my real New York, my young person 20s New York is post-9-11 New York. So watching sort of after this period of waiting on a friend, we had Giuliani, he really tried to like clean up and kind of like disnify New York in some ways. Times Square goes from being like a place for like swerkers and pornography and hustlers to God, whatever it is now. Family, family friendly. Um, you know, Bloomberg comes in, he really injects all this like big money and tries to make it even more like a kind of like glossy place for you know, capital to reside. So it's changed significantly since the you know, the version that's in the book. And part of that is wishing to have something like that back. So I wouldn't want to necessarily live in that time period because again, you know, I don't I wouldn't rather have my friends die. I wouldn't want to romanticize it, even as I can recognize like what was really good about that time period, too.

SPEAKER_00 21:39

So now that the book is out there in the world, it's not published here as we're having this interview yet in the UK, but it will be by the time our subscribers get to listen to this. And I wanted to ask if anyone has read the book and come to you with any observations or comments that have made you go, ah, I never quite thought of that or any reflections on the book. That a reader has given you that you might not have thought of yourself? I love that question.

SPEAKER_01 22:05

Now that it's out in the world, I have, I'm having my own like kind of little feeling of grief because it was like, oh, this was this was for me in a small circle of people, and now it's out, and I can only hope that it gets received with like as much. I know all creative people feel this way whenever you release something into the world, right? Or it's like, I hope they receive it with as much care as I took in making it. But of course that doesn't always happen and people will respond however. But I think that what has really kind of like given me pause is realizing like the extent to which younger generations don't quite know this history. And I I know that I deliberately read a lot about it, but I if you're a millennial or like a delennial, right? Like that kind of like if you were born in the 80s, late 70s, early 90s, you were raised with uh the feeling that like if you have sex, you will die. Like that was sex education. Um, definitely my country, maybe it was slightly better than yours.

SPEAKER_00 22:51

I don't know, but like I went to Catholic school, so it was very much if you have sex, then you will get pregnant and it will be the worst thing that will ever happen to you.

SPEAKER_01 23:00

It is the worst thing that could ever happen to you, you know, and there's nothing you can do about it, right? Yeah. So I mean there were there were those things. It was like you will get pregnant and die somehow, you know, were kind of the messages. We grew up with an association of sex and and death, like a sex in danger in a really not a sexy way. And if you're of a younger generation, and this is not to generation shame, really love my my readers who were curious about this time period, even though for them it's it's rather far away. But they grew up of an age where there was treatment for HIV AIDS, and then eventually there were ways to prevent its transmission and to, if you were HIV positive, to be undetectable and therefore untransmittable with the virus, right? I think that I was surprised, especially um, I had been teaching a chapter of Sarah Shulman's book, Let the Record Show, which was about the it's an oral history of Act Up, um, which was a global movement of pissed off people with AIDS and the people who love them who were fighting to end AIDS. So I taught a chapter of this, and my students who were all bored in the odds really didn't know a lot about this time period, which, like, sure, you know, you're you're a college student, but what they did know was really vague and kind of like, you know, maybe like there was a disease cured, and maybe that's because the natural march of progress is just that, you know, at first maybe people were pigoted, but then they came around. And that's just like not true to what happened or what like no change gets made because the people in power decide, like, you know, maybe we were wrong about this. It gets made because people who care gather together and they and they protest and they scream and you know, and they they make themselves problems and the problem has to be dealt with. And then sometimes it ends up being like, yeah, actually we do have to change. So I think it was really a surprise for me to learn what other people hadn't known yet, because I spend so much time with what I didn't know, right? Like I spent so much time with reading books, memoirs, zines, like everything I could from this time period that once you get really excited and like become like sort of like an amateur expert in something, you know, you forget, oh, you know, like maybe people didn't know this, that, or the other thing. So I guess realizing that this isn't a history that gets taught and that it was maybe at risk from of like disappearing, which ended up motivating kind of like the last stretch of the project. That was the thing that really surprised me. And I hope this book in some way, I hope that somebody reads it. Like the best thing that could happen is if somebody reads it and says, I need to learn more about this, what else can I read? It's the best case scenario for me.

SPEAKER_00 25:13

I think that's such a nice message that you hope readers take away, and I'm definitely certain that it will. But I also love that waiting on a friend feels like quite an accessible read for someone to pick up if they haven't known a lot about the AIDS epidemic. I mean, I know Renata and the ghost story at the centre is fictional, but you've managed to capture the devastating effect that AIDS had on the queer community and the way that everyone rallied around to get through navigating such a difficult time. So I feel like if I was to think of a fictional book to sort of dip your toe into learning more about the overall epidemic, but with a really relatable character at its core with this ghost element, I think it's accessible and a really great book to pick up. So I think if I was recommending a book for someone to read that was sick during this time, waiting on a friend would be one of the first that came to my mind. Yeah, thank you. So now on to a question that we ask every author who comes on the Wellread Women podcast, one that I absolutely love to ask, because I always come away with great recommendations. Wanted to know if there are any particular female authors that have shaped you both as a writer and a reader.

SPEAKER_01 26:27

Oh yeah. So I mean, the obvious answer to that is Sarah Shulman, who is a huge influence on me, uh, and not just because she's also a Jewish lesbian, but like she was writing these kind of I call Renata, um, this is perhaps not a term everybody is comfortable with, but like I would call her like a dike about town, you know, which is like downtown, um, downtown lesbian who's like a little tough and a little rough around the edges, right? And Sarah Shallman was writing those books. She was writing the Dyke About Town novels in the 80s, the kind of, you know, lesbian detective novels, but then also eventually novels more about the AIDS crisis and people organizing against the AIDS crisis. And then, you know, her nonfiction as well. Um, the gentrification of the mind was obviously a huge influence on me as I was writing this, where she talks about how these neighborhoods that suffered the highest losses of the of the AIDS crisis ended up being the ones that got gentrified gentrified the most rapidly and drawing the connection between those two. So her work was enormously important to me. And then I think that like, you know, I think that American liter literature has a really specific lineage. And I think that we're very invested. I mean, so is British literature, but like very invested in ghost stories and very invested in our in our own past and kind of fashioning our past in this way. So I thought for me, the great American novel is Beloved by Tony Morrison. And that was the novel that I went to the most. It's probably the novel I read the most in my life. I read it in high school, I read it in college, I read it in grad school, I read it after grad school. Like I turned to it to really learn how to write a ghost story because I believe that like a political ghost story happens when something that is repressed and pushed down, buried, it comes back and it's terrible and it's a problem for everybody. You know, that it's not just like an ambient haunting, but this is this is a problem that needs to be dealt with right now. And uh conditions will uh deteriorate if you do not deal with it right now. And, you know, Tony Morrison wrote this really gorgeous novel that is also painful to read, um, about slavery and trauma, the inability to start afresh in a way, and the conditions of possibility for that happening. And it's a novel that's also just really about not letting the not being able to leave the past behind, what it might actually mean to work through something. So that guided me in thinking, well, what would it mean? You know, so the AIDS crisis, homophobia, like other forms of oppression, like the history of slavery, like the history of racism in my country. Um, these are not things that you could just like simply leave behind. They will always be with us, but how do we work through them? How do we keep going and not just be pulled down to you know the miseries of our our past experiences without you know writing something that's like totally uplifting, you know? That was a guide for Sarah Shulman's work, Tony Morrison, those are the those are the obvious ones. And then I could probably talk to you for another seven hours about other things that I love.

SPEAKER_00 29:32

Yeah, no, I could actually sit and yap to you for hours all about books. Um, but there was one more question I had actually, and that was are there any underrated queer books that you think should be on our subscribers' radar?

SPEAKER_01 29:45

Oh gosh, yes. Look over to my to that particular shelf. I think that, you know, if we're thinking about AIDS literature in particular, I do recommend some of Sarah Shulman's older novels, like People in Trouble, Empathy, that deal with problem of other people, like deal with people being real and like people needing to step in and care for one another and to not neglect one another. I would also say, I think that if we're really thinking about kind of contemporary queer novels and contemporary lesbian novels, it's funny because sapphic lit is kind of like it's very in right now, and I'm really excited about that. And I'm also a little bemused because I am kind of like, are people enthusiastic about lesbian culture now? Is that what's happening? Is Sapphic like an inclusive term or is it really a way of not saying lesbian? And I think that both can be true for different people. But I know that like Sunburn is really popular, um, which is really great. But I want people to, you know, be inspired to pick up more books like that. So it's a book called My Lesbian Novel by Renee Gladman. It's a small little book and it's experimental, but it's experimental in a way that I think if you can ride, if you can kind of ride with it, you're golden because it takes place in in the form of an interview, um, a fictional interview that the author has written with herself, where she's talking about wanting to write a lesbian novel. And over the course of the interview, there's parts that are in italics where she's like, okay, let's start writing this. And what she writes is kind of her own lesbian romance novel because she's reading all of these sapphic romance reads. So if you're somebody who is like, and I think probably your readers and listeners are like this, genre agnostic, right? Where they're like, I want to read all of the best stuff in all of the best genres. I want to read literary, but you know, like I'm not gonna say no to a romance novel. I'm not gonna say no to a mystery or something like that, right? She is an experimental, like someone on the most like literary, experimental, like not um super famous um because her work is challenging. And she's like, I was just reading hundreds of these romance novels and metabolizing all of these romance tropes, and I wanted to write my own. So she kind of writes the romance novel and comments on the experience of writing the romance novel and like what what romance novels do, and sort of the pitfalls of them as being like, you know, kind of like the predictability of them, but also how like sometimes literary novels can't really write sex or love and how that's kind of a problem. So if you're somebody who's interested in in genre in this way, it's short, it's really interesting, it's weird, it's funny. So I would recommend my lesbian novel by Renee Gladman.

SPEAKER_00 32:09

Thank you so much for that recommendation because I've actually never heard of that book before, and I'm always looking for queer books to add to my T VR. I especially love books that are in like an interview format. Me too, yeah. Yeah, me too. That sounds definitely sort my street. Although I'm like a straight married woman, I always love reading queer novels because I feel I love to read about relationships and complex relationships, and I always feel like queer novels do it so much better. I don't really know why. Um, but you when you mentioned Sunburn there, that was one of my book club's first choices like back in 2024. And I don't know if you've read Heat Earth Upon It.

SPEAKER_01 32:48

I can't wait to read that. Yeah, I have it. Is it good?

SPEAKER_00 32:51

Oh my god, it's so good. It was actually a well-read women's subscription pack last November, and I didn't think it would be able to top Sunburn, but it was equally as good. There's like a queer element in that. But if you love books about yearning as well, there is so much yearning in this. It's so beautifully done. I really love Chloe's writing, but I think you will love that if you really enjoyed Sunburn.

SPEAKER_01 33:13

Yeah, I I have it and I I have to crack it open. I'm so excited.

SPEAKER_00 33:16

Well, thank you so much for joining the podcast, Natalie. I've honestly had so much fun chatting to you today.

SPEAKER_01 33:21

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 33:22

Thank you. It's just so fun to chat. No, honestly, thank you so much. Getting to chat to the offers behind some of my favorite stories is why I love to do this. And honestly, I could yap to you all day. I've just had so much fun.

SPEAKER_01 33:33

I love what you're doing. I love, you know, I love to focus on women and and you know, like the books are ostensibly all marketed to us anyway. And yeah, it doesn't really feel like that's the reality of the literary world.

SPEAKER_00 33:46

So I just really appreciate um, I just really appreciate what you're doing. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Wellread Women Podcast. We had so much fun chatting to Natalie, and we hope you enjoyed our interview just as much as we did. If you haven't read Waiting on a Friend, make sure you add it to your TBR because it's such an important and beautiful story. And one of our favorites from our June subscription selections, and also a firm favourite among our subscribers. Please like, follow, share this podcast. It really helps us. And if you want to learn more about our subscriptions and how it all works, visit our website at wellreadwomen.co.uk. We will be back in your ears very soon with a brand new author interview. But thank you so much for listening and see you soon.