Episode 44: The Leavers by Lisa Ko

07/26/17 • 50 min

Peilan Guo leaves China to go to New York, city of dreams, to make a new life for herself as a new person, Polly. Years later, caught in a sweep by immigration authorities, she makes the opposite journey, sent back to where she came from. But this time she leaves behind her 10-year-old son, Deming, who knows only that one day his mother went to her job at a nail salon and never came home. Child welfare delivers him to a white couple, who adopt him, take him out of the city, re-name him Daniel. Told from the perspectives of both mother and son, this is a story of the importance of names, the meaning of home, what it is to leave and what it is to be left.

Host Cyd Oppenheimer talks with author Lisa Ko about becoming the person you need to be to write the book you want to write; about trying and failing and trying again; and about how, after you've been working on a book for eight years, you know when it's finally done (winning a prestigious literary award before the book is even under contract is a helpful sign!).

Guest readers Emily Moore and Kristopher Jansma join Oppenheimer to discuss mothers and sons, coming of age, and language and its loss.

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Guest readers Emily Moore and Kristopher Jansma join Oppenheimer to discuss mothers and sons, coming of age, and language and its loss.

Order today!

Available from:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
IndieBound

Previous Episode

Episode 43: Who Is Rich? by Matthew Klam

Rich Fischer is a cartoonist, a writer, a teacher, a husband, a dad. He is also a has-been, an also-ran, a washout, and an adulterer. As the not-the-most-famous faculty member at a week-long summer arts conference in a bucolic New England town, Rich struggles with all of it: work, parenting, relationships, life. An intensely solipsistic narrator who makes all the wrong choices, Rich still manages to ask all the right questions. Can love and kindness thrive in a marriage pierced by exhaustion, illness, debt? How can we go on knowing there's no sure way to keep our children safe? Is human connection possible across a gulf of class and wealth? And, is making art defensible if it means exposing, and maybe destroying, those you claim to love?

Host Cyd Oppenheimer talks with author Matthew Klam about his process ("I write this sentence and then the next sentence and then the one after that and if I can't pull off the sentence that comes after that I know I can't keep going"); about writing the un-sayable ("I am trying to upset people"); and about whether it's possible to draw a line between fiction and autobiography. Also, they bond over their intense obsession with the writer Tim O'Brien.

Guest readers Annie Thoms and Jessica Sager join Oppenheimer to discuss concussions, broken arms, and diamond earrings; unreliable narrators and unlikely lovers; and what stories count as real and deserve to be told.

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Next Episode

Episode 45: The Locals by Jonathan Dee

In the small town of Howland, Massachusetts, in the foothills of the Berkshires, there's one post office, one tiny library, one decrepit diner. There are the summer people -- wealthy New Yorkers there for the scenery -- and then there are the locals -- people like Mark Firth, a contractor; his brother Gerry, a real estate agent; his sister Candace, an elementary school principal. The line between the two is clear. Until it's crossed, when hedge fund manager Mark Hadi moves his family to their summer residence full-time in the wake of 9/11, and volunteers himself as mayor. He cuts tax rates to historic lows, foregoing his own salary and offering to shoulder any emergency costs. Is he the town's salvation, or does his rise herald the death of democracy? A disquisition on inequality, class, power, and politics, this novel breaks open the American Dream, seeking to see what, if anything, is at its core.

Host Cyd Oppenheimer talks with author Jonathan Dee about writing a prologue that doesn't seem like a prologue ("I liked the idea of a kind of "smash cut" first chapter that led to the rest of the book but only in a thematic way"); about the rise and fall of the "social novel" ("The idea of dramatizing a social conflict or social problem by representing experiences on either side of that problem is a lot trickier now and that has to do with the reader's loss of faith in the magical abilities of the writer himself"); and about why fiction continues to matter in today's America ("[to remind ourselves] that the world is wide and history is long and that you can get out of the awful bubble that we're in, at least temporarily, and gain some perspective on it, by reanimating other times, other cultures, through art, through the novel in particular").

Guest readers Sam Purdy and Mark Oppenheimer join Cyd to discuss masculinity, morality, and authenticity.

Order today!

Available from:
Amazon
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IndieBound