One Drink Book Club | The Death and Life of August Sweeney By Samuel Ashworth

[00:00:08] Hello and welcome to another edition of the One Drink Book Club. Today I'm talking with author Samuel Ashworth about his new novel, The Death and Life of August Sweeney. August Sweeney is a celebrity chef who is a man of huge appetites for food, for sex, for fame. The book tells his story through Maya Zhu, the doctor performing his autopsy. Zhu is a focused and driven doctor who is a second generation Chinese American who has her own issues with intimacy and connection. Sam, welcome to the podcast.

[00:00:37] All right, Jamie, thank you so much for having me today. First of all, I want to say that I really enjoyed the book. It was an interesting premise. So just the whole idea of trying to tell somebody's story through their autopsy, through their death, and what scars and implications meant on their body and how it talked about the way they lived and the way they died, I thought was really interesting. And it sounds like it was a lot of fun to research and write that book. Fun sometimes. Brutal also.

[00:01:07] Very painful. Being that this is the One Drink Book Club, I guess my first question is, what drink did you bring today, inspired by the book? Well, I have brought a Corpse Reviver, number two, which seems like the only appropriate choice. Nice. I was a bartender for a very long time, and this one was always a favorite. What is in a Corpse Reviver? Well, usually it's gin, lilay, like triple sack or quattro. Okay.

[00:01:36] Lemon juice, and then it's supposed to have a rinse of absinthe. Ooh. Rinse, dry ass, tump it out. I don't have any absinthe. So instead I put, I happen to have a ton of egg whites. So I put a little egg white in there and I may have added a little much because there's a lot of egg white here. But the question is, do you do a dry shake and then add the ice or do you, uh, do you do it all ice altogether? I've always automatically shaken with ice. Okay.

[00:02:01] Though I could see how a dry shake might have played out better here because there is a lot of ice in my glass right now, which is poor if you're a bartender, but I'm not anymore. So I was trying to look for something that would go to August's gourmand side. So I actually was trying to find like something with caviar or foie gras or something. But what I settled on was kind of a basic old fashioned, but with fat washed bourbon. Yes. So I thought that that would, that would be something that August would appreciate.

[00:02:31] So it was bacon, fat washed bourbon. And then just to add a little extra, which is probably unnecessary. I had some 24 carat gold flakes that I put on top, which I thought, you know, for some of those New York restaurants he was working at would have definitely. He would very much have appreciated. That is a, that we could call that one the August, frankly. That was amazing. Well, cheers. Cheers. I sort of want your drink, frankly.

[00:02:59] It's funny when, uh, when I started writing the book, I was working at a bar in Boston. And as I was finishing my time there, they started making bacon washed bourbon. They were in the basement of the restaurant. There were big, big buckets with bourbon and they'd have the bacon in cheesecloth, just tea bagged into huge amounts of it. And that was the first time I'd actually tried that ever. You know, it's good. It's a little much, I think sometimes, but I also. That's August.

[00:03:28] Yeah, that's true. So moving on to the book, what was your inspiration for August Sweeney as a character? Like, did you base him on anyone? I mean, he was such a larger than life guy who was both endearing and charismatic, but also really driven. It's a great question to start with. The book originated in this sort of one moment.

[00:03:50] I was sitting at a bar in Boston talking to a coworker and somehow out of my mouth came the words, what if you could tell a person's life story by dissecting their body? Then I just sort of sat there and stared off in the middle distance. I don't know how long to the point where they were like poking me like, are you okay? Are you having a stroke? I kind of was having a stroke because I had been looking for a new subject for it. I don't think I even was looking for a new subject for a book, actually. It just happened.

[00:04:21] And I realized that that's what I wanted to do. And the person I was talking to happened to know of a book I didn't know about, Stiff by Mary Roach. Oh, okay. I, being a big dummy, didn't know anything about Mary Roach. Now, I love Mary Roach, but Stiff is a book. It's the curious lives of human cadavers and all of the different ways bodies have been used. And it's funny and brilliant. And reading her was a revelation. But by that point, I was kind of locked in.

[00:04:50] The problem was, I'm not a doctor. Right. I don't know much or anything about anatomy. I had taken a class in primate anatomy in college. I was about it. Which was surprisingly helpful. I'll bet. I mean, they're probably relatively similar. Mm-hmm. Okay. So you've probably never thought about this. You may not even know it has a name. But this little cleft between your nose and your upper lip is called the philtrum. Okay.

[00:05:15] And if you go, if you look at animals, most mammals have what's called a wet nose. Okay. Otherwise known as a rhinarium. That's the black nose of a dog or a cat or a bear or any other animal you've seen. It's not just their nose, though. That organ actually extends all the way down around their upper lip. This whole thing is an olfactory organ. Oh, interesting. But what that means is because this is all one organ, it doesn't move independently.

[00:05:45] When you get into the higher order of apes, that goes away. You look at chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans. They don't have that moist nose. They have a dry nose. And they also have this philtrum. What that means is their upper lips can move independently. And if your upper lip can move independently, you can make facial expressions. Oh, interesting. You can form language. You can form more complicated sounds. But especially you can make facial expressions.

[00:06:15] And chimps especially will flap up their upper lip. We can't quite do it. And I'm not doing it because I'm a camera. But all of that leads to increased socialization between the animals and between us. So a lot of what makes us human starts from this organ. And my favorite thing about it is that randomly I learned that the Chinese word for it is which translates very literally as human center. Oh, interesting. Center of a person. I don't know why they call it that. It's not in the center.

[00:06:44] But anyway, so it's that kind of curiosity, that kind of fascination with the body that sort of got triggered when I had that thought. And what happened next was I got lucky and a friend of mine, the whole story of this book is me getting lucky. A friend of mine was at med school and she agreed to let me come down to Pennsylvania and go to her gross anatomy lab, right? It's the first class for all medical students that they do. They do gross anatomy and that's you in a lab full of cadavers,

[00:07:13] which is not a place I ever really imagined myself. But one night she just let me in and there's 40 bodies in various states of... Unveiling? Yes. Unveiling. And this is important because in an anatomy lab, the whole body isn't visible at the beginning. Sure. They ease students in, which is very different from an autopsy. It's very, very different. And I would learn this eventually. I didn't know how I was going to react. It felt normal. It felt intimate.

[00:07:42] But, and this is where August comes from. I still didn't have any sense of... I had a sense of who the doctor or... I thought she was a medical student at first. Yeah. Maya came very quickly, but I didn't know who the body on the table was. And it wasn't until I went into that lab and I got wildly hungry. Like hungrier than I'd ever been. And my friend told me that apparently this is a pretty common reaction. Interesting. Um, I haven't looked up why this happens.

[00:08:08] I don't think there's a lot of peer-reviewed studies on it, but you know, there's the, there's the more holistic reason, which has to do with like you wanting to feel alive and your body compensating for, in some anxiety. And then there's, there's the part you might want to come out, cut out here. Cause I never know whether I should say this in public or not. I'm sorry, but human beings look like me. Well, that's true. And there's something about seeing it that triggers something. And you don't feel great about this sensation.

[00:08:34] You're not proud of this, but that was how I realized that this person had to work with food. This has had to be a cook. A combination of those things. And if I was going to do this, I wanted him to be the most fascinating body you've ever seen. The Moby Dick of bodies, the Ulysses of bodies, the Talmud of bodies. Right. And that's basically where August began. So he's not really based on a real person. Sure. As close as I could get to myth while keeping him anchored in reality.

[00:09:04] If you made me guess, I would have guessed that you started out with August and then worked backwards. It's really cool that you started with the autop, the autopsy idea, and then found the person that you wanted to have on the table. When I was about a year or two out of school, I had a similar experience where a friend of mine was in med school and we had all gone, a group of us had gone back to school and met with him, you know, went out with him.

[00:09:30] And we, I could say he let us in or we broke into that cadaver lab and had a similar experience. And we did go eat afterwards, but I thought it was probably alcohol induced and not necessarily cadaver induced. I think we hit Buffalo Wild Wings after that, but. I think I went to get wings too, actually. Maybe there's something, there's something there. You know, we should tell the Buffalo Wild Wings people about this as a marketing thing. You know. Do you fear death? Come to Buffalo Wild Wings and you won't worry too much about it.

[00:10:00] There you go. Like you'll accept it more if you go to Buffalo Wild Wings. So you have these really intense looks at two different worlds. So there's the autopsy side and then there's also the food side. And so it's a little kitchen confidential and it has a lot of really, your descriptions were great because in both of those situations, there's sounds, there's heat, there's colors, emotions. And I thought you captured it really well.

[00:10:27] How did you research both these professions? Uh, cause clearly, you know, you said you worked at a bar, you've been in, you know, kind of hospitality, but you're not a doctor. How did that work? All the research. I got immersive. I, that's sort of the way I know how to do things. I like writing about work. That's sort of the thing that attracts me. I'm fascinated by people who do jobs. Generally my framework for when I find a story interesting is I want to take a person who

[00:10:55] does something that is extraordinary that most of us can't really wrap our hands around, whether that's being an air traffic controller or a trauma surgeon or a soldier or what have you. And then I want to imagine how that job can become routine for them. How can it become ordinary? Sure. How can you feel so at home with it that it's a little bit boring? And then I want to meet that person on the day when it's not routine anymore. That's kind of how I lock into stories. This is just a recurring thing for me.

[00:11:24] I didn't plan it out that way. So for this book, I had the opportunity to go and do both of the things I had to do. If I hadn't been able to go to an autopsy lab, I would never have been able to write this book. It would have been, it just would never have come together because I was in, let's see, I was in grad school. And one of the beautiful things about being a graduate student, if I ask a person to let me into something, they are much more likely to say yes to a graduate student because you're

[00:11:54] not a journalist. Right, right. People will say yes, even though you tell them you're probably writing about this anyway. So I think it was 2017. 2017, I had a friend who happened to be doing a residency in pathology in Pittsburgh under maybe the only doctor in America who would have let a grad student slash journalist into his autopsy lab. And I mean, it was a life-changing experience. I wasn't sure how I'd react.

[00:12:21] The very first thing you realize within a couple minutes in that room is that everything you've ever seen on television or movies about autopsies is completely wrong. And I had tried writing this a bunch of different ways. I had written her as a medical student and I realized that she didn't have the knowledge I needed. So I made her a pathologist. Every word that I'd written to that point was garbage. It was, it had bareboard no reality to what a lab is like. And within two weeks, I had learned so much.

[00:12:48] I'd seen something like six or seven, I think seven autopsies I'd assisted. They wouldn't let me handle sharp objects. That's probably best. Definitely for the best. But when I came out of it, I just had such a renewed sense that this was something that I wanted to do, that this was a story I wanted to tell. And then that same summer, I got a grant from the program I was in to travel to France.

[00:13:15] I went to be a stagiaire, like a prep cook in a Michelin-starred kitchen in the south of France because I had never been in a kitchen. That sounds awesome. Was it awesome or was it hard? No. No. Give me the dead bodies any day of the week. And this isn't to knock the restaurant or anybody involved in it. It was really a judgment on me. Sometimes you go through a trial by fire and sometimes you just get incinerated.

[00:13:45] I wrote a big thing back in 2020 about this, but it broke me. It just broke me into little pieces because working in a restaurant kitchen, especially as the lowest of the low, it's 14 hours in a blast furnace on your feet doing highly repetitive manual labor with no margin for error. And that's my personal hell in every noun and adjective.

[00:14:14] They don't care if you're clever and witty and know how to use interesting words. Do not. No. It could not matter less. And I became a much more confident cook, even though I was really not suffered to cook anything. Right. The only time I got to apply heat to anything was I got to blowtorch some things, which was a delight. But largely what I'm doing is I'm scrubbing down the kitchen. I'm cleaning 150 squid.

[00:14:37] I'm chopping cilantro for three hours, cleaning in the walk-in freezer, which I don't recommend that. I don't know if you saw the bear. Yeah. The ending of the second season. Oh, yeah. Where he gets locked in there. No, no. No, no, no. Been there. Don't want it. So then that's kind of how it started. And I went to observe a bunch of different kitchens and watch them. And I spent a lot of time getting to know cooks. But the restaurant stuff was infinitely easier for me to write because I'd been around him my whole life. Sure.

[00:15:05] My dad was a restaurant architect when I was growing up. And I've worked in service since I was 16. And then I had a lot of people who were either pathologists or industry professionals read the draft. Nice. For accuracy. So I have a particular thing about accuracy. And that was invaluable. Well, I can't speak to any of the autopsy stuff. But I, you know, I worked in restaurants when I was in college and in high school.

[00:15:33] And while it wasn't high-end Michelin-starred restaurants, it still rang true to me, just that kind of environment. It's a really unique place to work. As you talk about jobs and things, there's a real camaraderie. But then there's, you know, this high adrenaline. And it's physical. I mean, you're exhausted at the end of it. And all of your stuff felt very real.

[00:15:53] And it jived with, like I said, Kitchen Confidential and some of those other books out there that are kind of first-person, not exposés, but just, you know, revealing what that world is like. And it's very different if all you've done is gone to restaurants as a customer. It's not. You wouldn't know. Yeah, and part of also what I really cared about was, well, you mentioned Kitchen Confidential. A lot of what people know about restaurants comes from books like Kitchen Confidential.

[00:16:21] And I profoundly loved the work of Tony Bourdain. Like, I don't have a lot of heroes, but he was one of them. And I started writing this book in about, the original idea was like 2012. And at that point, you had shows like Hell's Kitchen were really popular, Kitchen Nightmares. It's just the whole Gordon Ramsay school. And that was how restaurants were imagined to be, that chefs were screamers and psychotic.

[00:16:46] And everybody was on cocaine and was trying to work with nine fingers because they cut one off with a mandolin. And that was what was to be expected. And over the course of writing this thing and monitoring it, the whole restaurant world changed. All of it changed. And especially, Bourdain would have been the first one to tell you that the world that he characterized in Kitchen Confidential is gone. It doesn't. And he was the first one to say this. And he had a lot to do with making it that way.

[00:17:13] But it was funny because I actually observed different kitchens. And I'd worked for screamers. I'd worked for people whose mental health I was genuinely worried about. And I remember being in France. I worked for one of the women I worked for there. She wasn't a screamer, but she had management problems. She's a brilliant cook, brilliant restaurateur, but we'll have a Michelin star. But it was always just easier for her to do it herself. She did not like delegating. She did not like handing things to other people. And if people screwed things up, she'd get pissed.

[00:17:42] And then I went to another restaurant a little bit down the way in the next town over to observe them. And what I saw was absolutely the same level of food. Also, they wind up with a Michelin star the next year. And it was absolutely the calmest thing I'd ever watched. It wasn't like passive or even sedate. It was calm. It was professional. At one point, one of the Suis handed up a plate of fish to the head chef who was on Expo, right? He's plating. Right.

[00:18:10] And he stabs it with a probe, touches it, twits his lip, and he simply hands it back. And he says, it's raw. And it was the calmness with which he said it. Most, like the chefs we have in our heads would throw that plate. Right. Right. He's like, this isn't how it's being done now. And this is why these people made this restaurant. He just, he's like, let's raw. Put it back in. Yeah. He puts it back in the pan, bare hands it, back in the pan, gives it a minute or two, hands it back. It's fine. Good to go. Nobody lost their minds.

[00:18:40] And it was the seamlessness of this that took my breath away. And then to wrap it up, as I was finishing the book, I happened to be finishing the book at the end of 2020. And the end of 2020, two industries were currently going through an apocalypse. Oh, sure. The medical industry and the service industry. Not just because of COVID, but also because of me too. And the restaurant world especially. The closest analog to August is Mario Vitale. Yeah. Who you included in the book, which I thought was cool.

[00:19:10] He's in the book. And it made him feel more real. And that was the thing about Kitchen Confidential. It didn't include this fame. You know, because nobody knew who Anthony Bourdain was when he wrote it. So none of his book dealt with the idea that not only are you this professional and you're a business person, because there are two different things. You're a creative person, being a chef. But then you also have to know about how to make money. And clearly your character August kind of goes through that,

[00:19:36] where he's trying to experiment with all this stuff, high-end ingredients and kind of French recipes, but not acknowledging that, oh, yeah, we have to sell these. And that you can't ruin half of them. And you have to be efficient and all of those things. But then he's also dealing with this fame that he got from being on the Food Network. How did that affect things? So I think it added a lot more than just the look at the kitchen, because it looked at the industry in general and this kind of phenomenon of the celebrity chef.

[00:20:06] Yeah, thank you. I tried to make this book the most accurate thing book ever written, novel ever written, about the restaurant industry, because there's shockingly few of them, of high-profile ones in the last few years. The only one I can think of is Sweet Bitter, which is mostly about the front of house. And it's not as concerned with the business of it. The only business I understand anything about is the restaurant one. So I made it evolve. I followed him as he navigates the evolution of the industry over the years,

[00:20:35] until there's one final evolution. Not final evolution, but there's one wave he can't catch, because it catches him and it catches up with him. When I realized I had to write about Me Too, because I knew that whenever this book came out, it would have been on the other side of that wave, right? Things would have changed. I didn't know how, but I knew they would. And so I had to take a guess at what an equitable restaurant would look like, what parity and equity would mean.

[00:21:04] And also, I had to grapple with the fact that August was probably as bad as any of them. I didn't want that to be the case. My first instinct was, oh, no, August wouldn't do any of that. And I was like, of course he did. Yeah, probably would. Of course he did. He was as bad as anybody. And that's, I would say that's worse than killing a character. I don't know if I should say that. If I thought about that more, maybe I'd realize that's a mistake.

[00:21:30] But it was hard to take this guy that I loved and break him. Well, I thought you did it gently. You know, he was able to kind of come back from it. And the offense is, while bad, like, you know, clearly neither of us would want to do any of those things in the workplace. But on the spectrum of Me Too, it was towards, you know, the lighter side. Maybe that's, you can't say that. But he was a bad guy, but not necessarily the worst guy. That's sort of how I threaded the needle a little bit.

[00:21:59] I was, yeah, there are things you have to do to get to the end of a book. Yeah. Well, all right. So I had a question about that, that realism. You talk about, part of the way August got to start was that he was on the early, early side of going on the Food Network. And in these early years, they were cooking in these totally inappropriate kitchens that, you know, have electric heat and a sink that doesn't work. And he catches on fire during one scene and somebody has to run in with a fire extinguisher.

[00:22:30] And that they literally just, they didn't edit this stuff. It was, here's 30 minutes and this is how it goes. And I thought to myself at the time, this has to be real. This has to be how it was because you wouldn't just throw that in there in the book. Is that true? Is that how they did it? Completely. And a lot of this is based, I should give a shout out to the author, Alan Salkin, who wrote a book called From Scratch, which is called The Uncensored History of the Food Network. Oh, interesting.

[00:22:56] And I think it's an oral history in particular, but it is completely true to life. The only, in fact, the only part of the book that we changed to avoid any legal issues, I thought I was going to get in trouble about for using people like Mario Batali and Padma Lakshmi. But everything I said about Batali is documented. And Padma Lakshmi comes off really great because I love her. But when it came to the Food Network, there's that scene where he sets off the smoke.

[00:23:24] He lights himself on fire and he sets off the smoke detector, which sets off all the sprinklers in the building. And the president of the company races down the hall and throws the emergency shutoff valve to the water. And there was a line in there that said like the valve would remain off by order of Reese Schoenfeld, the president of the Food Network, until like 1999, by which time the Food Network was in August was in 10 million homes. Sure. And they were like, we don't know that this happened. And the guy's dead. Right.

[00:23:53] We probably can't make an allegation like that. So I cut the line about by order of him. But everything else about that is true. The stuff about Emeril, the first show was in fact called How to Boil Water. That's how they launched Emeril. Everything went into the can. Everything like went into the can, right, right onto television. No reruns ever. And the only way that the Food Network knew how it was doing, how a show was doing, because they weren't getting rated. You mentioned that. It was all about phone calls or letters. They could only.

[00:24:23] Letters asking for recipes. Yeah. And so I loved that. I just, I loved that world. And I am incredibly fascinated in the experience of fame. I think being face famous is a terrifying thing. Right. But I am fascinated by what that life is like for those who live it. It is so interesting. You and I both live in Washington and are, I mean, my experience with fame is not necessarily movie stars. It's politicians. And I've often thought, I was once at a dinner.

[00:24:53] It was like a big fundraising dinner after the McCain election. And Sarah Palin was at the dinner. There were probably 5,000 people at this dinner. And she happened to be sitting like right behind me. And this is even before really selfies were a thing. People didn't have phones with cameras, but people came over with cameras and started wanting to take pictures with her. It started with a trickle and then everybody was doing it.

[00:25:16] And even people at our table who were not Sarah Palin fans at all wanted to do it because she was famous, not because they liked her. And so it ended up the next day, there was a photo in the Washington Post that happened to be our table getting their photo with her. And the caption was Sarah Palin and her young supporters at a thing. And I thought to myself at the time, how screwed up does this affect your ego?

[00:25:44] Because to her, how do you walk away from that and not think everyone loves me when the reality is no one there? I'm sure there were some people who were actual fans, but they were really mostly fans of your celebrity and wanted to get close to that and weren't necessarily fans of you. Yeah. Yeah. It's just a bizarre thing. They're taking pictures of themselves with you? Yes, exactly. It has little to do with you. Yeah. Right.

[00:26:10] And honestly, again, I try not to talk about politics because I deal with it a lot during the day. But, you know, I have the same feeling about as we, you know, Kamala Harris is going to deal with that. You know, one day you're at a rally with 50,000 people and Oprah is your best friend on stage. And the next day, nobody wants to talk to you. It's got to be just a bizarre hit to like who you are and your perception of yourself. It's just so strange. It's just a weird world.

[00:26:37] That's it's fascinating because in my other life, I'm a ghostwriter and I wrote the memoir of a politician who dropped out of politics and sort of dropped out of sight because he had PTSD. And he was for a time, he was very well known in the democratic world and he was absolutely ubiquitous in his state. And then he just dropped out. Yeah. Banished from view for a while.

[00:27:01] And at one point, and he said the way people would look at him when he when he would emerge, when he would go grocery shopping or whatever was they would sort of whisper to each other. And it would be as if they were saying, oh, that's Jason. He died. And he I a lot of my experience of I've been I grew up in New York City. I grew up in the theater world. So ordinarily, I'm very calm around celebrities.

[00:27:27] I'm working on a movie now or working, working with some people who are I've I've had to walk down the street with and watched them get noticed, get stopped. Sure. And I think actors especially are fine with this because actors want everyone to know what they look like. Right. It's a different thing. Yeah. But it is fascinating to me the pressure that that puts you under in every social interaction.

[00:27:50] And you can either choose to be someone who safeguards that social interaction for the person that they're meeting. Because that the power dynamic of that meeting is so complicated for you, the famous person. It is meaningless. Right. For the person who is meeting you. It could mean a lot. Even if it's small and incidental, that's a reflection on you that how do you handle this moment? You're under pressure. How do you do? Right. It's your job as the recognized person to take care of them in that moment.

[00:28:20] To make sure that their experience of you that they'll take away is a good one. Or you can completely choose to not give shit. You can be indifferent to it because you cannot be responsible for everyone around you. And the way that people navigate that pressure. And you can see why people isolate inside bubbles, right, of other famous people. Because who else will understand? And I wrote that into the book. Like one of my favorite parts of the book is when he thinks he's out of Olympus. He thinks he's gone.

[00:28:47] But the jizz is still wants to smoke cigars with him outside the natural history, like the natural history museum deck. You're right. It's, you know, one of these moments where the celebrity is not going to remember it at all. They're not going to remember it half an hour from there, but the other person is going to remember it for the rest of their life. And, you know, I imagine that there are people who are mostly good at, like you said, taking care of the person who recognized them. But I would like to think I'm a nice guy. And if I were famous, I would be, I would take care of people like that.

[00:29:16] But I can imagine that if I were in a bad mood, something happens, I walk out of the, you know, like there's no way I'm going to be that way 100% of the time. Yeah. I'm having a tense dinner with somebody. I'm having a, I'm having a, I'm getting broken up with and somebody wants a selfie. Exactly. Like I, I cut them some slack for those times. If somebody consistently seems to be a jerk, then I get it. Moving on about the, about this book though.

[00:29:41] So their father and daughters are kind of a theme in the book and parental relationships in general show up a lot. You have kids. How do you want your relationship with them to be different than the relationship you have with your parents? How is it different from the relationship I have with my parents? Yeah. So, you know, you have kids. Could not be more different. I don't. And how does that play? Like what was, what was your motivation to include that kind of father daughter tension?

[00:30:10] It was very much a pure fiction. Maya is, I'm not going to say she's based on my wife because my wife is not like her at all. But my wife is Chinese. She did emigrate here when she was seven. And so a lot of the, and like I speak Chinese. I spent a lot of time in there. And so there is a, there is a strain of her story in it. But I, this doesn't describe her relationship with her parents almost at all either.

[00:30:37] I think what Maya came out of was me really. Maya is a kind of version of myself that there are times when I wish I could be. Maya wants to be a scalpel. She wants no attachments to get in the way of what she loves. I'm fascinated by the inhumanity of devotion to humane things. When people are in the humanities, especially are so consumed what they, what they're making that they become inhumane themselves.

[00:31:07] And Maya to survive has always learned to repress box out focus. She's miraculously focused. And so I knew I needed to do two things with one. I needed to understand how she got that way. And two, I needed to make it impossible for her. I needed to push her until, until she broke just like August. Yeah. And so her father really came out of that.

[00:31:35] And I thought that if anything, her dad, as we meet him in the book, her dad, right. As we quickly realized has had a stroke and this severe disciplinarian, this chef in his own right who taught her to heart at herself has suddenly appeared as this sweet kind of delirious man who's had a huge personality change and everyone else is charmed by him except for her. And it's because this is not her father until we realized that maybe this is the man her father always wanted to be.

[00:32:04] And in that he's pretty based on my death because my dad's a goddamn delight. Yeah. And I made him, I loved that I could make a character who would be irresistible to everyone else. And so she spends the whole day trying to resist it. But I don't, I just don't really rely on autobiographical material very much. I don't trust it. I'm also not that interesting. Yeah. And if I lifted my wife's story, she, you know, kill me in my sleep. Oh yeah.

[00:32:33] I, I, I concur with that. Well, I thought the, the father was a great addition because yeah, it's, I always find stories where the character changes in some way, far more interesting than when you say, okay, here is archetype this, let's put them in this weird situation and see how they act. I think it's far more entertaining to take a more normal situation and, and take a person who is changes throughout that, that journey.

[00:32:59] And so the, her father changing and then subsequently making her change a little bit. She had to, she had to loosen up. She had to show more of her emotions. She had to trust her, her assistant. All of that stuff seemed to be a good change for her because, you know, she was so distant with everyone. Even you kind of allude to her sex life being almost anonymous. I mean, she would seek out partners, male and female, and it was very much just a one night

[00:33:27] stand after one night stand just, you know, to fulfill physical needs. And so. And, and, and academic interest for her. Yeah. Oh yeah. Fast. She's looking for body. She does not really care who's inside. Mm-hmm. So she likes, she, she will go after geriatric bodies. She'll go after big ones, small ones, all kinds because it's, that's a comfortable mode for her. Yeah. Almost a research project. Yeah. Yeah. Sex is research. And for August, sex is consumption.

[00:33:57] Yeah. Another food. Food. Yeah. It's another food. And he, and for both of them, I had to get them to see other people as things that mattered. And I, maybe that sounds trite, but I think sometimes that can be the hardest thing for really devoted people to admit. All right. I have a writing question. Oh, good. There were several sections and maybe this was that I was that where you didn't use quotation marks for dialogue.

[00:34:27] Nope. Was that just that I was reading a pre? Oh no, no, no, no, no, no. So I'm. Oh dear. I didn't think so. But then I was like, I'm well, so here's my problem. I'm not smart enough to figure out what you were trying to tell me by doing that because I also am, I tend to get involved in the story. So I'd want to, you know, like keep reading. So I didn't examine like each time I saw it, it just like flagged something in my head. And I thought, wait, sometimes he's using it. Sometimes he's not.

[00:34:56] So this is, this is a, this is a fantastic writing question because that's an insight into just how little we all know what we're doing. I do not know at one point, at what point this started to happen. What I don't love quotation marks, but I don't have very strong feelings about them. So when I started with August, August always was without them. And some point or another, I started doing them for Maya just to be like, well, I'll figure out later which one I want. Sure.

[00:35:24] And then the publisher picked it up and I was going at it with my editor and we were going around and around, like, what do we do? And I would try to change one August chapter. I'd put it in quotation marks. So I'd take them out of Maya's and it never felt right. And in the end, what felt right, what you're describing is that August for listeners, the story alternates every chapter. It goes August to Maya, August to Maya, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth the whole time. Except August story covers 52 years.

[00:35:53] Maya's story covers one day. So the time signatures are totally different. And without giving too much away, August's story is being told by somebody. It's being written down. It's being captured. And so somehow the artifice of having no quotation marks worked for August and it didn't work for Maya. And so eventually, I don't know whether it was me or my editor, Adam, Alistair Ganey, we just went, can we just leave it? Because there wasn't a right answer.

[00:36:22] And we decided that leaving it that way, it gave a good textural difference we found between the track and show you immediately knew where you were. Yeah. Because it's a very similar voice in both stories for a reason we'll learn. Right. But that textural difference helps you, I think, subconsciously sink in. Although in your case, I'm worried that it did exactly the opposite. Well, no. You know, and I think if I had, what I didn't do is like, I should have like bookmarked those

[00:36:49] pages and there's also that shift between when you go back and forth. Yeah. I think if I had really examined it, I would have figured it out. I just, you know, it was something I would, I would notice it and then I'd keep going and I wouldn't really think about it too closely. Yeah. There's like a little bit of a, you just, you change gears. Yeah. When it happens. I also have this thing that I am a little obsessed with, which is I like it when you

[00:37:17] can hear the fictive music of a piece, which is to say, I really like it when you are reminded that what you are reading is invented and you continue to believe it anyway, because you sort of recommit. Sure. This is why breaking the fourth wall is so powerful because it is, you are telling the reader, you're the viewer. This is fake. I made this up. Someone has made this up. Right. There is a set. This is a character.

[00:37:44] I'm an actor, but your faith in the story is unbroken. In fact, it's stronger because it's been tested like that. So things that do interrupt the dream and you go back to sleep again. Yeah. I, I really like that in fiction and that may just be a me thing. Well, Hey, I mean, that's, that's the kind of thing, you know, talking about jobs, you know, I'm not a writer.

[00:38:10] And so it's really interesting to hear how writers think and how they want to, to create these emotions and how they want their reader to perceive things. And I think you probably know a lot more about it than most people, you know, think about it as a casual reader. It's possible to overthink it too. Well, that's true too. You know, we asked, we know. We never know whether we are viciously overthinking something or not. Usually we probably are. Well, what's next for you?

[00:38:38] What's what are, what are you working on now? This comes out when, you know, we're recording this before it comes out. I'll publish this around the, in March when it comes out to the public. What, but what, what's your next project? What are you working on? Right now? I, so there's two things. One is a long-term book project that I've been kicking around in my head and I may be turning into a screenplay. I've pivoted to screenplay. Screenwriting up pretty hard in the last two years.

[00:39:07] I got brought into something and I've found that I love it. Um, partially because it's collaborative and I like working with people. I'm happier. I don't, I'm the kind of person who doesn't know what he thinks until it falls out of my mouth, which is how this book got started. That's me too. Um, talking gets me into trouble. Me too. Hey, yeah. The, the, the project that I really want to do is there's two ways to pitch it.

[00:39:34] Um, one is the sexy way where I say, let me tell you about the most powerful American you've never heard of. And it is the man responsible for American economic dominance in the last 75 years. Um, the most powerful unelected official in us history who did more than anyone else alive to cement American economic dominance. And who was also the whole time a Soviet asset.

[00:40:03] Ooh, interesting. It sounds sexy. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And then I tell you, who is he? Who is he? And I tell you that he is, this is a novel based on the, the true story of an assistant secretary of the United States treasury, an economist who is, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, responsible for the world bank, the IMF and the use of the U S dollar as a global reserve currency.

[00:40:30] And who basically, and this is where, and it's the story of the man who set up Bretton Woods. Oh, interesting. You are an economist listening to this. You just clapped your hands with glee because you know who this guy is. I, I just visited the room where the Bretton Woods, uh, cords were signed in Mount Washington hotel. That's where my, my son's getting married there in August. Whoa. Yeah. Ooh. Ooh. I love that for you. That's going to be great. Yeah. I w I went there two years ago.

[00:41:00] I go and my wife and I, who kind of has the job that this man used to have. Oh, interesting. Um, we went and we got a nice tour from, uh, like a more in-depth tour about the, about the conference. But yeah, when you say you're pitching a book about an economic conference, people, people go, why? So, so I, I like your first, your description, your first description much better. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds very interesting. But you know, I tried why I liked this.

[00:41:28] The best thing I can say in my defense is that I tried really hard not to write this one. I tried to have better ideas. Um, I tried to, I came up with other stuff. I started writing other books and then I found that whenever I would talk about the other books, um, I would talk about why they were important, why I could do them, why I had the access that I needed. And whenever I was talking. You tried to convince yourself. Yeah. Yeah. Like it, it, it was the right sensible choice. Right. Right. And then when I started talking about this book, I could not stop.

[00:41:57] I would just go and go. Well, that's a good sign. And finally, one day I heard myself and I said, that's how you choose. Cause it's always hard for us to choose what the opportunity cost of every book is so high. Sure. Oh yeah. Time, emotion, money, all that. Yeah. But writing the project you can't shut up about is, it's usually a good sign. One of the better pieces of advice I have, even though if, if it's a deranged project. Correct.

[00:42:25] So I'm working on like, I'm kicking that around. I'm starting work on some new scripts and we'll hopefully the one that I've done gets moving soon. Um, nothing is, you know, I, I don't know. I'm mostly trying to get this thing. Sure. Well, no, this is exciting. Yeah. It's really exciting. Well, thank you so much for taking the time and joining me here and, uh, sharing a drink.

[00:42:51] Cheers to the release of the death and life of August Sweeney. Death and life of August Sweeney. That, I think I'm going to take your cocktail idea and that'll be the August in my head from now on. That might have to be it. All right. Well, good. I really appreciate it. All righty. Well, if you're listening, please subscribe or visit the one drink book club.com and join us next time for another book. All right. Thanks, Jamie. All right. Hey, thank you. Thank you.