Amherst Reads Transcript

Tia Subramanian (TS): Well let's get started. Hello everyone and thank you for listening to Amherst Reads. My name is Tia Subramanian and I am so excited and proud to be interviewing my dear friend Kate Stayman-London. Both of us were Amherst grads in class of 2005. Both of us were English majors, but Kate's focus was on creative writing and specifically playwriting and her new book One To Watch comes out on July 7^th, her first book. So we are very excited about that. So I am going to start by just giving a quick overview of Kate’s careers since graduating from Amherst College, because one of the things that is really noticeable about this book is the way that the enormous diversity of experiences you've had Kate have found their way into this in some way or another. So there have sort of been I think two major strains of Kate’s writing career or careers since you graduated from Amherst in addition to all sorts of different kinds of writing which we’ll talk about. Kate’s always been very mission driven person who's worked on a lot of progressive issues and has always been very politically involved. So after graduating from Amherst, Kate moved to DC to work for a union. Worked there for a little while which also took her progressive organizing work to go to Ohio, to San Francisco and she then in 2009 moved to LA to pursue a screen writing degree. And ever since then Kate has balanced writing a range of different types of fiction, a lot of screenplays, pilots etc., while continuing to work on politics and becoming a highly sought after writer for progressive campaigns. And she has freelanced organizations like Glaad and Change.org and written spots for people like Barack Obama, Malala Yousafzai and Anna Wintour. And the only break from this freelancing career was when Kate served as lead digital writer for the Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign which took her to New York for a couple of years. But she is now back in LA and about to have her first book come out. So, one of the things I've always admired about Kate is the incredible… is the fact that she's become an expert in so many different types of writing. And so I thought we'd start there Kate with the question that you know you built a successful career in all these different ways, written all different types of fiction for various causes, and this is your first book. And your first book is about a story about a plus size fashion blogger who ends up on a Bachelor style reality TV show. So how did you… how did you land there? Why this genre? Why this topic out of all the different things that you could have done?

Kate Stayman-London (KSL): I mean… I think it was inevitable. Right? Tia, thank you. That was such a lovely introduction. So, yeah! So, in 2015-2016 I was working for Hillary Clinton and that, by the way is where I got to do a little writing for Anna Wintour, whose office provided me my favorite feedback I've ever received on any piece of writing, which was: She hates it! She has no notes. Which I thought, who could… who could ask for a better fantasy, than Banana Wintour saying that about your work. So after the election it had always been my plan to come back to Los Angeles and sort of resume screen writing and fiction. But I found myself in rather more of a depressing place than I think I would have hoped for, and I was you know trying… I was talking with my literary agent and going back and forth on different ideas. I had intended to write a sort of Bridget Jones on the campaign trail kind of chronicling of my experience, but I found, I just… it was too raw and too soon. And I couldn't write about the campaign. So in early 2017 I turned to one of sort of my favorite pastimes at the end of a long day. I was watching The Bachelor and it was Nick Viall season. And it was the season finale and I was sitting on my couch, and it kind of hit me like a bolt of thunder! I was like, wow! What would it look like if a plus sized woman for The Bachelorette? And something that… so you know, if you don't watch the show, there's no one above size 4 on that show, basically ever. It felt so interesting and fun and escapist but, also witty - bad pun. And I, you know, that night stayed up till one or two in the morning, just writing a quick overview of what I thought a book could be about and sent it to my literary agent the next morning. And she said I love this. Try it! See if you can write it. And I sat down and wrote the first chapter that Saturday. We took out a proposal I think two months later, and then Random House brought it in a preemptive, and the rest is history.

TS: It’s incredible. So, um… so building on that, I want…I'd love to dig a little bit more deeply into the genre that you picked. I mean we know, we've talked often about how genres are used to devalue the contributions of women and people of color. Men can write a book about their experiences and it's a universal novel and when women do it, it's women's fiction or whatever other detrimental term people want to use. So, is… what made you decide to write in a genre that you… that would fall very squarely within you know category of women's fiction. And, therefore, come loaded with you know, assumptions about quality, about audience, about reach etc.

KSL: Yeah! Well I think it's such an interesting question and to some extent it's a little bit inescapable. Right? So, I'm a woman who's interested in writing about women's experiences for women readers. And so by definition that, a little bit makes it inevitable that whatever I write is going to be labeled as women's fiction. So, sort of… if I live with that and instead of getting angry about it, and think how can I use this to be feminist, and be subversive about what's happening in popular culture. I think that the best kind of genre writing is really amazing at kind of capitalizing on what genre can do in saying, OK we have this set of rules, like you have with romantic comedy, but also like you have with action or with science fiction, then you can have this huge, huge reach with what you're writing and still find ways to be really subversive. So I think about a movie like Black Panther, right, which took you know this… this big giant explosions action movie and said incredibly subversive things about race and power. Right? And, so thinking about a long history of writers I really admire, who I know you do as well, thinking about Jane Austen, thinking about Nora Ephron. The way that romantic comedy has been used to comment on women's roles in society and on sort of rules and power and all of these like really deeply ingrained gender dynamics, that's always been so fascinating to me. And romantic comedy it's just one of my favorite genres. I really love it. So the idea of working within that genre to say something subversive was really exciting to me.

TS: Yeah! Yeah, I that… that absolutely resonates, mean your book people will hopefully buy it and see the cover. It's… it's beautiful and pink and blue, and it looks like a beach read, and when I think about all the different messages in there, I mean it feels like a radical act to have put all of that into that kind of packaging and that genre. So just following up on that, we're talking about genre and value and devaluing , I guess, what do you… how do you value your work with literature? What were you striving for in this? How are your values driving it?

KSL: Yeah. I think for me as a writer and the way I was trained the most important thing you can do is keep your audience entertained, right. So you know when you pick up a book, to just not be bored, to want to keep turning pages, to be interested in what's happening in front of you. And then that's the baseline right. That's the bare minimum. And then once that's happening, how are you showing growth and change and sort of being emotional arc of a character? What is the impact that the work is having? So for me figuring out OK, how am I going to write a really entertaining story but also, how am I going to create a character who through this set of experiences that she's having is going to experience real growth for change? And thinking about how are you creating a character who's going to have the hardest possible time with this situation that you're putting them in how are you going to pair them together in that way? So to me taking on this idea of a plus size fashion blogger who's so used to you know, she's Instagram famous and she has this version of herself that she presents for public consumption which is often at odds with her private life, and her own you know, sort of viewers and emotional turmoil. And then saying OK, if that's the core conflict of her character, how can we turn the dial all the way up on that where it's not just her Instagram feed? Now she's on national television with an audience of millions and swarms of producers and you know Twitter trolls and columnists and podcasters. And kind of the whole world that exists around her, sort of the way they perceive her in the way that they're judging her choices. And how can she in the midst of all that noise maybe come to understand something about herself? And about why she has presented herself perhaps differently then? And who she really is? And start to figure out how she can make the right decisions for herself in spite of all that noise?

TS: Yeah. That all makes sense. I'm just thinking about the… anyway… anyway. Moving on to the next question. Many things I could comment on that but as you… so this is your first major publication right? But your academic training and another area of expertise is in screen writing. So you went to graduate school for screen writing. So can you tell us about that training and what you learned in screen writing that informed writing a book? I mean did it feel like training for a completely different thing or was it… did it sort of help you put together the structure of a novel?

KSL: Yeah! I mean I think all novelists approach their work differently. For me my background in screen writing was extremely helpful in that, with screen writing you have this really specific kind of structure that you can really trace it back. If you want to do that, I don't know why you would, but you can. And in thinking about sort of you want the story and the structure to be as simple as humanly possible. Right? Where you have… you understand exactly what's happening. Sort of one of my… sort of mantras that I follow is a quote from Stephen Sondheim, who of course is not a screenwriter, he's a musical theater writer. But he says, “All in the service of clarity without which nothing else matters.” And what he means by that is, that if the… you know it doesn't matter however wonderful your story is, if the audience doesn't understand it you have failed as an artist, and it is your job to make what you're saying clear. So I think for me in writing this book and having a really clear… you know… Bea who is the protagonist, her name is Bea, is going to go on this reality show that's a dating reality show with 25 men competing to be her husband, but she absolutely refuses to fall in love. Having that really simple premise that has… provides an emotional arc for her. Then once I have that in place, I can get so much more complicated in terms of having, you know, I have five or six different romantic plotlines that I'm balancing, as well as her relationship with her executive producer and, I have a lot of mixed media and, then novel with tweets and podcast transcripts and, slack channels and, everything like that I can sort of build my Christmas tree and, have a lot of fun with it. When I come back to that really, really simple structure, which is what screen writing training drove into me of, sort of having that basic, most basic part of the story laid out so that you have something to build on.

TS: Yeah. That absolutely makes sense. I mean when I first read it, I read it ridiculously fast. I raced through it. And there are so many different scenarios, so many different kind of twists and turns of these feelings. But when I thought about it a couple of days later, it did not feel like a jam-packed novel  to me. It felt like a kind of very clear arc. So, yeah. So I thought

KSL: Thanks. It took about four drafts to get to the point where I was like, oh this is the arc. I found it. And sort of ones that was one of those ah ha! moments when I understood really, really clearly what her arc was and what the moments were where her emotions changed and why then it was. But then you understand what every scene is building toward. And if the scene is building toward the next shift in her arc then you're doing it correctly and if it's not building toward that, then why is it in there, right. And that's something that's very with screen writing is so different because every page is money, and it represents you know hours of filming and peoples time and paying the actors and whatever. So you're really trying to tell the story with this few pages and a few lines of dialogue and everything else is possible and having sort of that kind of rigorous… what's the word I'm looking - just discipline. I found it really helpful even though it is a little bit of a thick novel 'cause we have a whole season of television to get through in there making sure within that that every scene is really hewing to that, that arc and that structure.

TS: Yeah. That's… its… that's not something that I think about with fiction writing. That every… everything that you put in needs to kind of be leading to something. That it's sort of you know is that… I think that much more when it comes to visual entertainment, but that's probably an incredible discipline for fiction writers and I can think of many books that would have benefited from that point of view. So switching gears a little bit to another part of your experience. You have, as recently mentioned, done a ton of political writing. Did you work on campaigns and progressive causes and politics inform this book?

KSL: Yeah. Absolutely! I think in particular you know the idea of writing about a woman who stars on a reality television show I actually drew a lot on my experience working for Hillary Clinton. And this feeling that every single day millions of people were watching every move that we made and were suddenly so interested in us, not just in Hillary, but in us, the people who were working for her. You know I remember one day someone texted me like, you're on Stephen Colbert! And I was like I'm not on Stephen Colbert. I'm at home you know taking a sleeping pill trying to get 4 hours of sleep. And you know we had done this blog post where some of us dressed up as Hillary for Halloween wearing different outfits from her history and I was one of them and they were showing it on Stephen Colbert. And then you know one day there was a photographer from Time in the office, and I wasn't paying any attention and then a photo of me sitting at my desk looking unbelievably haggard and unhappy about my life in the world ends up in Time magazine. And it is still, very sad to say, on my grandmother's fridge. So yeah. It's a tough one every time I go over there but so this notion of kind of everyone is staring at you. I found that so fascinating. And I really wanted to sort of imbue that experience into Bea’s journey starring in a television show. But I think also and we can talk about this more specifically, that I really wanted, you know, sort of my commitment to social justice, diversity and inclusion, to dismantling systems of oppression, I wanted that ideology to really inform the kind of story I was telling in the way that I was writing about it. And you know I think it's - that's who I am. So it would be impossible for me to separate that from any work that I was making.

TS: Right. Right. So I mean you've worked on a lot of different social issues over your career right, and this book takes on fat phobia. Or one of the most prominent issues it takes on is fat phobia. How did you come to that? What… why that issue? How does it relate to other work you've done?

KSL: Yeah. I think real thread of work that I've done particularly around feminism is ownership of women's bodies. And I think if you look at issues like reproductive justice and access to health care, if you look at the way you know, we're talking right now about the murders of black women specifically, and black trans women and the way that… that gets ignored, sexual assault in the Me Too movement, revenge porn, restricting the rights of sex workers. There is this big intersecting system of different ways that we control women's bodies and fat phobia and beauty standards. It ties into those symptoms… to those systems right. And it might, you know it might not feel serious in a lot of ways you know, there are lots of serious things, but for a lot of women right, this idea that being thin is the most important thing that you can be defines women's entire lives. Every… you know the number of women who've been on diets since they were kids, every single meal that you eat, how you spend your money, how you pursue relationships and how you think about yourself in the context of being single, or being in a relationship and the ways that media reflects this, are a gigantic part of the problem. So for me that phobia and you know, as I said, that kind of idea came to me about thinking about fat phobia and reality shows like the Bachelor. It married so well but it was also an idea to say OK how can I write about an issue that I think is really important and deeply impactful for a lot of women but do it in a way that still has a lot of joy and can still feel like escapism and doesn't have to feel you know like eating your vegetables. Because you know that just wasn't the kind of story I was interested in telling and it wasn't the kind of place that I was in in my life right. I… I needed that joy and not escapism. But I wanted to do it in a way that still connected to an issue that mattered to me.

TS: And especially in light of the 2016 election the extent to which women's experiences and rights to own body were undermined by those outcomes and everything that followed. Yeah. That yeah… so I guess continuing on that, it seems like another… another system or sector that you are sort of subverting in this is fashion. So I know that you've always loved fashion. We've often talked about fashion, but it's another… it's another sector, another set of interest such as that's dismissed as trivial. Partly because it's gendered. So… and the character in this book Bea absolutely loves fashion. So talk to me about your relationship with fashion and how you see it fitting into this you know broader issue of claiming your own body and what you want it to do by bringing that into this book.

KSL: Absolutely! I've loved fashion ever since I was I guess like an early teen. I remember the dress that really opened my mind was this chartreuse John Galliano for Christian Dior dress that Nicole Kidman wore to the Oscars in 1997. And it was such an interesting, fabulous, weird over the top, dress and it was on the cover of People magazine. And I remember just reading that issue over and over again. And I loved red carpet fashion in particular ever since then. But it's really only recently that you've gotten to see fashion like this on bodies that aren't thin and white. And so for me you know fashion is this really joyful means of self-expression. If you want to present yourself as chic or as playful or as colorful or as a sexy siren you know whatever it is that especially for women but for everyone that fashion can be this wonderful means of self expression. But not for fat women. Because you don't have access to the clothes. And when you think about you know all the fashion houses that only make up to a size 10 or 12 when 2/3 of American women are wearing size 14 and above, that these fashion houses are so fat phobic that they would rather cut out 2/3 of their market than make clothes that fit fat women. It's just… it's so ridiculous to me. So in writing this book I was thinking about you know movies like Pretty Woman and The Devil Wears Prada, where we get these amazing fabulous fashion montages where we see a woman suddenly have access to an incredible designer closet and I wanted to create that kind of fashion fantasy explicitly for a plus sized woman. So it was really important to me in the book that if you read about a garment that Bea is wearing in One To Watch, that designer in real life makes clothes that go up to at least a size 20 and often more. So I really wanted to do my research and celebrate those designers that are being more inclusive in their designs and hopefully you know kind of undo there's this stereotype that fat women aren't interested in wearing beautiful quality garments and that's ridiculous. It’s hogwash. So you know to try and undo that stereo type a little bit and then create something that felt like a fun and beautiful fantasy for plus size women.

TS: Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. I mean in the… and I think people really under… there are so many other ways in which fashion is a kind of site of breaking apart some stereotypes. Like I've been working on a paper of investing in LGBTQ issues, and you know fashion is one of the sectors that is at the forefront of moving beyond gender binaries and reaching a wider market of people who may be gender nonconforming.

KSL: And I think it’s not a coincidence right, but when you see brands that are size inclusive, those also tend to be the brands that have more diversity in their models. Those are the brands that have nonbinary and trans models and models you know with differing abilities and you know who are from all different backgrounds and races right. Because these issues all intersect with each other and the notion of inclusivity cuts across a lot of different spaces and that's true in fashion and very visible in fashion. But it's true in every industry right. And as we are having this moment of kind of reckoning with which companies reflect our values and which don't, it's never surprising right, because if a company reflects these values then they reflect those values.

TS: Yes absolutely. And so speaking of fashion but in a slightly different thread, the… I know you are someone who loves old movies, like me. The kind of fashion icon from the… from the golden age of Hollywood cinema that keeps showing up in this book is Barbara Stanwyck . And I remember when I first read the book, texting you excitedly after 15 pages in because you had mentioned both my favorite wine, Sancerre and Barbara Stanwyck , who may be my favorite actress of all time. So talk to me about why is Barbara Stanwyck  in it? Barbara Stanwyck s is also someone who I would think would not necessarily be familiar to a lot of the audience that you may be writing for here. I mean somehow for some reason Barbara Stanwyck  seems to have disappeared from our collective imagination.

KSL: Somehow for some reason. Well.. so yeah. There's so much in that question. I love it. So one thing about this book that I love is that there are pieces in it that are really unfamiliar to younger readers, and there are pieces in it that are really unfamiliar to older readers. And so you know, there's a lot of sort of Twitter and internet nomenclature that happens in the book. Like I talk about stan culture in the book, and my step mom was like, what is a stan? And I was explaining that it comes from you know an Eminem song about a fan who becomes a violent stalker and she revealed to me a couple of days later that she thought I had meant M&Ms the candies and that a violent fan culture had been a mental take up in an M&Ms commercial. But my editor… I was just throwing in kind of all of these references to old movies, because as we say, I loved them and my editor was like why are all these references here can we just cut them? And I was like no, they are important to me. So we actually kind of turned the dial up on it and made it an essential part of these character that she really loves old movies, like you and I do. And with Barbara Stanwyck  in particular, I love film noir and I love Barbara Stanwyck  and one thing this is actually really relevant to the fashion question. Because to me fashion is so much about how do you convey power as a woman and I think a lot of sort of notions of what power dressing or dressing as a powerful woman is sort of adopting these masculine traits in the way that you dress. And I kind of reject that notion right. Because I… for me the idea of expressing power through femininity is both something that I try to do in my own life, as I sit here with bright pink lipstick and turquoise hair. But it's also you know something that's so interesting in the way women are portrayed on screen. And so for me Barbara Stanwyck  is the total emblem of incredibly feminine, powerful presence. And she doesn't sacrifice an ounce of femininity for her power and she doesn't sacrifice an ounce of power for her femininity. They're totally intertwined. And so for me in terms of thinking about this character of Bea and her journey is so much about her femininity and her power, having Barbara Stanwyck  be her role model in that way… she was the only one.

TS: Yeah. That's fascinating. I mean that's actually related to my theory about why Barbara Stanwyck maybe is not… sort of continues to live on in the way that Grace Kelly or Katherine Hepburn does, because there is something about Barbara Stanwyck,  there's a power to Barbara Stanwyck that I don't think anyone… anyone ever got, no one ever got a handle on her. Even in the movies where she is being abused, there's just the…she's… she still somehow holds power. There's something really scary and dangerous about her and that's my theory about why…

KSL: And it's unnerving. It's off putting. As an audience member to try and reconcile that she can be as you said, she can be abused, she can be murdered and she still feels like the most powerful person on the screen. And to try as a woman to reckon that idea that, within a system that's built to disempower e you, that you can still be powerful and what is that? That you know I think, that's a question I'm going to be writing about for the rest of my life because there's so much to say there.

TS: Switching gears a little bit, another theme that comes up a lot in the book that I know is very close to your heart is, travel. You absolutely love to travel. You and I have traveled together to beautiful wine destinations in the past. You have taken a lot of extended trips and spent time in Paris just sitting and writing and there's a lot of there… there are a lot of destinations in this book. Two of the main destinations for plot points are France and Morocco. Both places you've been. So how, I guess how did that… how did that show up in the book? What about that did you want to bring into this book?

KSL: Yeah. Well I mean, one of the things I love for folks who don't watch the Bachelor and The Bachelorette is that, they are travelogues to a certain extent. And you know there's always a moment in the season where the whole cast sort of picks up and goes, and then there filming in Fiji or Thailand or France or Italy. And it's so fun to kind of get to see these over the top romantic fantasies unfold in these beautiful places. And so you know thematically, so much of what I was writing about was what is the reality of falling in love with someone and having kind of authority and complex relationship in these beautiful over the top kinds of locales. You know whether you're, you know, at the Eiffel Tower or the spice market in Marrakesh or whatever it might be. But it was also so much fun for me just to be able to tell readers about these places that I really love. You know you and I took a pretty unforgettable trip to the Loire Valley where we were traveling around and drinking something there and really beautiful wines. And there's you know we went to the Chateau Chenonceau, which is also my favorite chateau. And I set one of the most dramatic scenes in the book there. And it was such a pleasure to be able to write about these places that I love so much, and hopes that readers will discover them and maybe visit them themselves one day.

TS: Yes. There's… there's so much to discover in this book. And speaking of wine. One of my favorite parts of the book, of course, is the care and attention you took to which wines you picked for certain scenes. I mean, I… you and I have talked about this but I often rant to you about how it wine shows up in various places as though people don't take the trouble to actually do the research of which wine is suitable. And so you read something and it’s completely off. Like I couldn't… I couldn't think of a better example than Fifty Shades of Grey. But I remember reading Fifty Shades of Grey and the billionaire character keeps drinking White Sancerre which is just… it just doesn't mean what they think it means. Yeah, but so I… I just… and also by the way for readers, the accompanying… there's an accompanying book club guide to this book that includes a wine guide that Kate and I wrote together. We match different wines to different characters. So we encourage people to look that up and grab a couple of those bottles of wine and enjoy them while you read this. But yeah. That's another example of something that it seems like another example of something that you love and want to introduce readers to, right?

KSL: Totally. And I think you know for me all writing it starts from a place of joy right. and it's like in thinking about the things I wanted to write about in this book I just was looking for you know, travel, wine, reality television, falling in love. I just wanted to explore all of these really joyful things and sort of allow my own personality, old movies right, like all these things that I love. You know there are million pop culture references. It's a representation of my voice and obviously you know a lot of times when you're writing you are sometimes thinking of specific people you know who are reading and… and how they might react and anytime I was going to mention wine in the book, I would certainly be like, if I do a bad job of this Tia is going to be so mad at me. So I took care to make sure to do some accurate wine representation throughout the book.

TS: So let's talk about so this is… this is you know writing as I mentioned at the beginning, you started writing plays at Amherst. So can you talk a little bit about your time at Amherst as an English major and how it informed your writing and maybe shows up in this book?

KSL: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So I at Amherst I would say the professor and the courses that really changed my life were the playwriting classes I took with Connie Congdon. And she was just such a huge influence on me in terms of thinking of myself as you know, quote unquote “real” writer, whatever that means. And the thing…that you know playwriting is such a unique medium because it is so aural – a u r a l and so audio driven. The way Connie talked about how to write a play is that you listen to what your characters say and then you write it down. We transcribe it. An almost like a medium like experience of listening to the characters speak. So my training in terms of the kind of dialogue I love to write whether that's in a book or in a screenplay or if I'm writing you know tweets for a politician, it's always really informed by that training of hearing dialogue. I have this distinct memory of a particular class in Connie's Playwriting 1 class where I had written this one act, embarrassingly titled Love With a Jersey Girl. I'm from New Jersey. It was about a mother and daughter who were both experiencing different versions of intimate partner violence and their respective relationships and sort of the ways they got angry at each other rather than connecting with each other over the shared experience. And you know it was probably a ten page one act or something. And we read it, you know we performed it in class 'cause, that was… it was workshop class and you know some two people in the class would perform the play, then everyone would critique it. And we sat there for half an hour after the performance talking about it and discussing it, and the different elements of it. And it made me feel like, oh wow! I could really do this for the rest of my life. And so then I wrote a play for my thesis which was a play dramatizing the gay rights movement in Buenos Aires because Buenos Aires was sort of without any explanation or fanfare, the first city in Latin America to legalize same-sex civil unions. So I wrote a play kind of imagining some of the circumstances that led to that, and Connie was one of my advisors and Professor Javier Corrales from the political science department was my other advisor. So it was you know going all the way back - this unity of politics and creativity in the arts, being the two things that I love most, and that Amherst was a place where it's like, yeah sure you can be an English major and write a play about gay rights in Buenos Aires, and you know, a world famous playwright and a Latin American political expert will be your advisors who will help you do this. So having that kind of training, but also that kind of support in doing the work, it really I can't imagine any place setting me up for success more than Amherst did.

TS: Yeah. That's amazing. That's really interesting you say about the aural piece, because one of the things that I noticed, and a lot of early readers of your books have noticed that…there… all the different parts about different kinds of media, that the tweets, the bloggers, etc., they…they just ring true in a way that they don't with a lot of books. They don't feel contrived and that is… that's actually really, really difficult to do, and you can hear them. You can…I just I can see that through-line of view, kind of saying them out loud and then putting them down that gives them an authenticity that I think a lot of people don't achieve when they try to jump around.

KSL: Totally! And I loved writing those pieces so much because I think it's a reflection of the way we consume media now, right. Like you're not just watching a movie or a TV show in a vacuum. You're listening to a podcast, you're reading a blog post, you're talking with your friends. And, so including that felt really authentic and obviously the Greek chorus is… uh… again heading… heading all the way back thousands of years, that is a really important way for us to understand narratives and stories - is to have this kind of commentary culture right. So I thought from a storytelling perspective and from you know it's unity of form and content which is my favorite thing and it was so much fun you know, as a person who's written tweets professionally. That’s a weird thing to say, but it's true. You know to be able to do what I've done professionally for presidential campaigns about a pretend reality show was just personally a victory.

TS: Congratulations on it. Just having fun. So what would you think… you started to answer this a little… what would you say to Amherst students and aspiring writers? Would you have any advice?

KSL: Yeah. I think there were a few pieces of advice that I've heard or seen over the years. The first was when I was considering going to graduate school for screen writing. And I had sort of this you know nascent but established career in politics that I was thinking about giving up, to go be a very broke graduate and then try to be a screenwriter, and my stepmother who's an actress, said to me, you know don't do this if you can do anything else with your life. But if you can't do anything else with your life then you have to do this. And that sort of feeling of, yeah if you can't be anything but an artist then congratulations you're an artist. And it doesn't matter if someone else is paying you to be an artist, if someone says that you are you aren’t and a critic approves of your work. If you can't be anything but an artist then congrats, that's what you are. So that advice has changed my life, because it's the way that I made that decision and everything incredible in my career that stemmed from that. And then the other thing that really you know drove me to write this book in particular, Toni Morrison says, if there's a book that you want to read but no one… but you… no one has written it yet then you must write it. And Jordan Peele says, to write your favorite movie you've never seen. And so when I had this idea of like a plus size Bachelorette, I was like, if this existed it would be my favorite book, I would love it so much right. It would be everything that I loved in one story, and so I was like well then, that's it then, I have to write it. So I think you know my advice for anyone who's out there, you know write the story that would be your favorite story you've ever seen. Write the story that won't leave you alone, that you can't get out of your head, that you know that you have to be the person who tells it. And yeah I feel unbelievably grateful as a person who wrote something you know that made me feel so joyful now to be able to see so many other people feeling joy by you know… I literally I got an Instagram message the other day from a girl who said, this is my favorite book of all time. I was like are you kidding me? Because I thought it would be my favorite story, but anyone else would think that too, my God it’s extra blessing. So yeah I think, find the joy. That's the best advice that I can give.

TS: That's… I can't think of a better place to end then “find the joy.” Anything else that you want to share with people or that sounds like a pretty good place.

KSL: I got nothing.

TS: Take that with me for the rest of the day. Well thank you to everyone for listening to Kate's first book, One To Watch, again it comes out on July 7^th. Please grab a book from a local bookshop not Amazon. Am I allowed to say that? I hope so.

KSL: Oh you can also if you're having trouble accessing your local book shop during the pandemic, you can order through bookshop.org and you can set it so that the proceeds will benefit your local book shop and I would particularly encourage you to support your locally owned bookshop.

TS: Yes. Bookshop.org. You can find the best way to find books. Well thank you Kate.

KSL: Thank you Tia. Thank you Amherst.

TS: Thank you Amherst.