[Francesca] Malavika Kannan, welcome to Writer's Voice. Unprecedented Times is a coming-of-age novel whose protagonist is an Indian American young queer woman called Rishi, who as the novel opens, is beginning as a freshman at Stanford. Tell us about Rishi. [Malavika] Rishi is like my little sister. She's like my alter ego. She's the protagonist of Unprecedented Times. She is a really deep feeling college freshman who has been really invested for a while in trying to make the world a better place. When the novel opens, she's actually spent several years as part of a Gen Z climate movement that's best epitomized by the work of Greta Thunberg. She has tried really hard to stop these major forces, and she's reached the conclusion that it's not going to happen and that she wants instead to become a writer. She's also hoping to leave behind the conservative strictures of her Indian American upbringing in Florida and just see if a new life is possible for herself in college. [Francesca] You say she's like your little sister. What do you mean by that? [Malavika] I think that she's a protagonist that I feel very connected to and protective of. Even as an author, you try to write characters who are morally complex and whom the reader can disagree with and whose coming of age journey has a sense of momentum and growth. I think that's why I feel a little separate from her, but I also feel very attached to this character. [Francesca] Where she introduces herself as the luckiest girl on earth, born in America, spared certain historical limitations, given opportunities her parents could have only imagined when they were her age. Although her mother did come to this country in a real bid for independence, yet luck can also become a demand to be grateful and successful. What does the idea of luck illuminate, and what does it conceal about the lives of children of immigrants? [Malavika] Thank you for that question. I put a lot of thought into that first line where she pronounces herself the luckiest girl on earth, because I think in many ways that is true. I think particularly for those of us who are growing up right now and seeing the impact of American foreign policy abroad and devastating impacts, it can be hard not to feel like, as Rishi puts it, that she was lucky to be born in the belly of the beast instead of its jaws. Those of us who live in the first world, as a climate activist like Rishi would be aware, are contributing disproportionately to the world's climate emissions, but are less likely to face the impacts of it. So I think that there is a supreme luck in just being born in a condition of opportunity, but it is one that Rishi is very aware comes at a cost, even if it's not the cost that she bears. And I think that maybe as a child of immigrants, she's more aware that there is someone else bearing that cost, because her own role in this country is kind of provisional. She mentions her parents even being welcomed into this country as if they had won the lottery. It happened to be that historical circumstances favored tech workers from India, but the tides could as soon as well change, which they have in the past couple of years. There's been a lot of anti-H-1B visa discourse among the conservative and Republican wings of American politics. So I think that for her, the sense of luck is the idea that her place in this country is tenuous, often has a cost that cannot be morally justified, but nonetheless, she wants to make the most of what she has for as long as she can. [Francesca] And yet, as a climate activist, those costs that have been borne disproportionately by, you know, what we could say is colonized or neo-colonized regions, are coming home. And in fact, as a climate activist, in a way she's concluded that adults have effectively asked children to save a world that the corporations are destroying. And we talk a lot about climate activism and climate issues on this podcast, because even though I love all kinds of writing, I'm a climate activist. And it's an existential threat to all of us, but especially to Generation Z. And in a way, could be the unluckiest generation. Many people who are of that age don't feel particularly lucky. [Malavika] Yeah, I think that's fair. I think that that theme kind of comes up in the book too, that Rishi and her friends realize both jokingly, and then it's very much not a joke that sometimes knowledge and awareness is a curse if it is not coupled with increased effectiveness to do anything. And like the specific moment in American politics that Unprecedented Times is set against, which is 2020, was a moment that I think that felt particularly true to a lot of us. Like people had a lot of rage, a lot of language to discuss what is happening. They even had an outlet on the internet to express it. But like the outcome we saw that was often just an immense polarization, maybe the enriching of tech companies, but not like inability to like further the American democratic project like substantially. [Francesca] And you yourself were an activist when you were in high school with gun control, is that correct? What happens when a generation is taught that catastrophe is imminent and gun control is already a catastrophe, it's not imminent, it's here, but are denied the power to prevent it? [Malavika] Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really good question. And we're seeing that play out a lot right now. I think that the sort of the media narrative of Gen Z is that our generation is characterized by a degree of like listlessness on we an inability or a refusal to follow certain paths and milestones that previous generations would have, whether that is the idea that fewer Gen Z women are participating in sex or heterosexuality, or like, more people are quiet quitting and not putting their hearts into like, their careers like they used to, or people are even having the failure to launch or whatever to like, just like the economy is too hard to get out of their parents house. I agree that the future looks different. And there is going to be an element of refusal to play by old rules, whether that refusal is because options just aren't available to us anymore, or because people have seen them determined, as Rishi puts it, that a lot of them are scams and decided that they want to find a different way to orient their lives. [Francesca] Yeah, could you say more about that? What are the things that feel like scams? [Malavika] Yeah, something that Rishi early on in the book announces that she thinks is a scam is the idea of an American dream or even like an arc of progress that like bends towards justice as like the MLK quote goes, like, I think that she's seen that that does not seem to be the case that in fact, the ability to like, pull the levers that used to work, whether that is voting, a college education, you know, certain things are just not delivering the promises that they used to anymore. I mean, it's interesting, like something that I might have done differently. Like, if I were to rewrite this book, like given like the Silicon Valley setting of the book is to have allowed Rishi and her friends to perhaps have a sense of political stakes as to why that is like, I do think that like, a lot of like the extreme inequality and polarization of our era can be tracked pretty compellingly to some of like the developments of tech platforms, which is something that just doesn't really occur to Rishi and her friends. And I do think that that kind of awareness and sort of backlash to tech platforms is more of like a post pandemic thing. So it might have been a historical for them to be on that wave in 2019. [Francesca] Yeah, no, I think that's true. And maybe that's your next book. I don't know. But especially having come from Stanford, which of course, is the center of the tech entrepreneurship push. Let's go back to her parents, though, and and her relationship with her parents. I mean, they've survived migration, racism, economic uncertainty. She wants to regard herself as self-created, but the novel keeps returning her to everything and everyone that came before her. Those links her difficult relationship with her mother is one of the ways this plays out. But on the other hand, it's also, it's a relationship of love as well. So talk about those contradictions. [Malavika] Yeah. So the viral meme that went around in twenty twenty four, the Kamala Harris line, you think you fell out of a coconut tree, but you're actually the product of everyone before you. That ended up being the epigraph of the book, because I thought that was in some way could summarize the thesis of the book quite well. I think that Rishi is someone who is trying to embark on a project of self-making. And there's one vision of that, which is maybe like like the Western liberal vision of like an individual who is kind of in control of their own destiny. And I think that is in some ways like what you're supposed to train to do like in a liberal arts education, which in a way almost feels like a sort of antique way of thinking, because by the time Rishi and her friends show up to elite colleges like Stanford, like the vision of like a well-rounded humanistic student is like not really in the picture. Everyone just wants to become a consultant or like have an A.I. startup or whatever. Like the pursuit of like money, I think, comes before everything else. But nonetheless, she's trying to figure out like a way of being. Maybe she has like some sort of ideas that she picks up from like literature about like like an artistic genius, being like someone who goes through a bunch of things and then makes meaning out of it. But I think throughout the book, like she craves and is grateful to realize that so much of what she needs is found in the people around her. [Francesca] And she's queer. So that's an added element of friction in the book with her parents, with her mother, with her mother more than her father. And I thought that there was a kind of lovely interplay. Her father really does accept her and her mother has real difficulty with that. Often people think that that would be reversed, you know, that the father would be more censorious. Talk about why the father, why you chose the father to be more accepting and what's going on with the mom. [Malavika] So I think something that Rishi says as a joke in the book, which I think is true, is that moms usually get like a much worse reputation in like the narratives of their daughters. And like like the subject of like homophobia of like maternal homophobia is one that comes up in a lot of queer people's writing and is one that I read and consumed quite a bit of other projects about when I was determining how I wanted to manifest in my book. And I think that unfortunately, like a lot of writers are the ones who get the last words of their parents. Whoever doesn't accept them kind of gets painted unilaterally as a villain and that's that. And I think like maybe a previous generation of like queer American writers, even ones who are children of immigrants, would have sort of like subscribed to a very individualistic school of thought that's like cut your parents off immediately if they don't understand you, which the limitations of that line of thinking becomes very clear, even like during a pandemic. You know, but I was interested in how to humanize the mother's perspective, which I would have wanted to do anyway. But seeing the success of a movie like Everything, Everywhere, All at Once starring Michelle Yeoh, which came out while I was writing this book, made me realize that people were very much looking to have a mother, despite her homophobia, be accepted and seen as a full character. So I think that was the first thing I thought about. The second was that a woman like Rishi's mother, like an inability to accept her daughter doesn't come from the place that you might expect. Like old sources of meaning that might have governed both of their lives no longer have any purchase. Like religion is not what her mom goes to to justify why she wants her daughter to not be gay. It's just like that she does. She thinks her life is going to be hard. And I think that that level of mutual incomprehensibility, like Rishi's mom doesn't know any gay people, Rishi thinks that everyone by default is gay, because that's true for social circles. So I think that level of like mutual incomprehensibility, just by like, how much more quickly I feel like cultural gaps accelerate than they may be ever used to before. It's what kind of makes this so tragic for them. [Francesca] And why does that happen? [Malavika] You know, I've been reading like various philosophers on why that is like, I could be wrong, like, I don't want to make an ahistorical claim. But there's this idea, I think that's been surfacing in a lot of like, contemporary discourse, that the gaps between generations now are wider than they ever used to be. That might be like empirically supported, or like, I guess the idea that the difference between like a woman and her mom's life now is much greater than the difference between a girl and her mom's life might have been in like the 18th century. Like, again, this is like hard to like, say, like, objectively or empirically, and I'm sure everyone thinks that they are like the most unique and unprecedented person on earth to make a callback to the title. But I do think that a degree of like, mutual incomprehensibility between Rishi and her mom is really exacerbated by destructural forces, like immigration, and her mom grew up in a totally different country, which is like, now a very common experience, because most people in America, or a lot of people in America are children of immigrants or immigrants themselves. But I think the internet is another huge factor as to why Rishi thinks that being queer is like, normal, and even wonderful, and that her mom doesn't. [Francesca] I want to talk about Rishi's relationship to writing, because she not only wants to be a writer, she, in many ways, experiences her life through the language of fiction. She takes a class in autofiction, stories help her create meaning, but they also can make her feel like she's a central character in other people's lives. What are the dangers of understanding ourselves narratively in this way? [Malavika] Yeah, Rishi suffers from like, a really bad case of what was like, jokingly called during the pandemic, like main character energy. And I think that there was an era that I sort of missed as kind of like woke thinking, as I say this jokingly, where like, anything that was done by a sort of marginalized person was like, automatically given some degree of like, moral righteousness, just because it was coming from them. And there would have been almost like, maybe even like a decade ago, a kind of girl boss undercurrent telling Rishi, like, yes, you are the main character of your own story, like, like, ask for that promotion, like, do your thing, like, kind of vibe. But like, thankfully, that's passed. And I think that Rishi is a character who, while her main character energy makes her very, like, funny and charming and like, compelling to people around her, and I hope to the reader too, I hope that the reader will also be able to notice that she is often a very bad friend. And I think that is like the beauty of being able to write an ensemble cast too, is that even if one character is flawed, there are other characters who are able to let the reader in on that. [Francesca] And friendships are stronger than sexual relationships in the book. But even there, keeping the boundaries between them is difficult, not just between friendship and romance, but also between one's own needs and the needs of the other. And I think that, I mean, this is the classic issue that confronts women of many generations and many different sexual orientations. Because, you know, we are programmed in many ways, still programmed to put others needs before our own. And yet, it's important to balance both. So I wonder if you could talk about how this plays out in the relationship between Rishi and her friend Georgia, and Rishi and her other friend Kavya. [Malavika] Yeah, I think that that's like funny that you like, I guess point out that's true, that that is like a way that women have sort of historically been socialized. Because I would joke that Rishi kind of moves like a man in this book. Like, I think that's true. Like she does, like, use a lot of other women for her own self-actualization and kind of assume that like, they should cater to her and how they act. And she also moves through women really fast in the book, which I think is like kind of funny. And people sometimes even joke that we need that kind of like bad representation of kind of like, like badly behaved women too. But yeah, I think that Rishi is someone who like really craves like companionship and to be known deeply. And that's something that she says that she's never had before. Because she mentions that in Florida, she had a hard time like fitting in with the culture there. And like, she loves her parents a lot. But there is like the degree of like incomprehensibility that we just discussed. And I think that college is the first place that she finds other women whom she relates to, in that they are really idealistic, earnest, they care a lot about trying to improve the world. They take themselves very seriously, as she does. That's one of the first things she points out to like her new best friend, Georgia. It's like, she's like, wow, you take yourself really seriously. And like the goals that you set for yourself. And I think that like, it's hard to blame her the first time, although when it becomes a pattern, it gets the reader notices that Rishi tends to find this kind of woman like, really captivating and sort of like, enter this all consuming relationship where she like squeezes too hard, cannot distinguish between a platonic or appropriate platonic and romantic boundaries, and then it ends up collapsing. [Francesca] The epidemic. Now, this is a reference, I think, to the title. We've been hearing that these are unprecedented times since then. And they just seem to get more unprecedented all the time. The characters end up at Big Sky Farm. Tell us a little bit about this farm. And why did you bring them together, this ensemble of characters, as you referred to it before, bring them together into this place? [Malavika] I think that that is like something I've, it's like a sort of pet fascination of mine is like communal or alternate forms of living. I think that they have had moments of being in vogue at different points of American history, like the 60s would be like a big example of a time that like a lot of people. And like, I would argue that the 60s were probably as bad as the 2020s in terms of just like, and the intense feelings of like a war, civil unrest, social movements, this and that. And like many people like did have the urge to like drop out of society and try to find alternate ways. So like, it was interesting for me to imagine that in the 2020s, young people might be compelled to do something similar. So the main characters of this book take a gap year from college, and live on like basically like a woke queer BIPOC farming collective, which is like, would have been weird on its own. But the farm is extra isolated because they're all practicing like COVID safety procedures. And I think that I initially decided to send them to the farm to give them another pressure cooker environment in which to have these kind of like interpersonal conflicts, experiences and dealings. And I wanted to create a setting that in some ways felt like a weird funhouse mirror to college and that it is cloistered and there are like weird social norms. But it also opens like existential questions about like, is this a better way to live? And Rishi's mind, there's no doubt that this is just a temporary side quest that she's on that like, this is not the life that's called to her. But to her best friend, Georgia, who does come from more of like a lineage of like this kind of like leftist thinking, she's like, No, this is me. This might be it for me. [Francesca] Yeah, there were many of those communities, as you point out in the 60s. And some of them succeeded. And some of them did not. But a lot of the ones that I knew of were like Big Sky Farm and were led by these charismatic men who had a lot of power. And they ended up in many ways reproducing the very conditions that they were supposedly set up to solve. Conditions really of authoritarianism in some way or of top down. Why do you think utopian communities are so often vulnerable, not all of them, but vulnerable to recreating structures that they reject? [Malavika] That's a good question. I think that like, probably the simplest answer is that a lot of these structures are not external but are internal to a lot of us. And if we were raised in them, we're like, to some degree going to be compromised. I have lived in like kind of strange cooperative living communities in the past. And the conclusion that I took away from that is that even though these communities were really flawed, I didn't think that they were necessarily more flawed than the rest of the world. So I wasn't like mad that people were trying something different. But I also have never lived in a community where like a character like Larkin, who is the cult leader of the group and who does in fact have like a really weirdly sexually manipulative relationship with a lot of women in the house, experienced that. So maybe I would feel differently if I did. [Francesca] Yeah, really, it does come down in many ways to how ingrained the notions of power are in a society that is sexist, ultimately, and that those are inculcated at a very, very early age in the family. And then they become very difficult to overcome. Did you want to say something more about that? [Malavika] Oh, I was going to just say that, that I think that's true. And I did try to complicate this a little bit too, because like one of like the main themes of the book is where she's like and her like sort of philosophical question, like, is it ever going to be possible for me to engage with men on equal footing? Like, is this a battle worth fighting? Or is it maybe one worth exiting? And like, you see her having relationships with men that like, in many ways, Rishi is the one in charge of most of her dealings with men. Like the first man that she sleeps with, who later gets me too, but not by her. Like she is the person who initiates the relationship with him. Even the cult leader, she's the one who initiates that relationship. And like, I was like very careful when I was writing the scene to have him be surprised that she would want that and to like give her a couple of chances to back out. Because like, I thought it would be almost like a little bit too convenient for like the moral thinking of this novel for it to be that the characters are like fully like unilaterally victims at the hands of men. Because that does not take away like the reality of patriarchy. But I think that it would kind of allow us to have a more effective response to it if our thinking about it wasn't so black and white. [Francesca] I really did appreciate the moral and ethical nuances in this book. I mean, these were real people, you know, with their contradictions, which is always much more interesting than characters who are just cut from a pattern cloth. Rishi is in control until she's not. And we won't say why she's not. But the novel explores consent, sexual consent through the institutional training at our college. There's sexual experimentation and talking about, you know, how people give consent and they don't, the character's own assumptions. But talk about when that breaks down and what happens to Rishi. Again, you know, it's always difficult in a novel. I don't want to give anything away. So I'll let you talk about about that as much as you want. But how Rishi confronts the breakdown of her assumptions about the safety that she thinks she's created around her? [Malavika] That's a great question. I think that one of the main themes that I was trying to explore in this book and that I think about a lot as a person is the question of agency. Like, to what degree we have the ability to build lives that are different from what structures of power would have for us. And also, it's not even just big structures of power. Rishi is also probably battling against her own maybe adverse brain chemistry and maybe inheritances from her mom and stuff in terms of how her mind works. But again, one of the big forces that this novel contends with is, is it possible for women to have safe, equal and liberatory sex with men? Which is not far from, I think, the question that maybe sexual liberation was asking in a previous generation. And Rishi is someone who has come up after the very sex positive millennial movement that I would say did have its brakes pulled by Me Too, when people were kind of structurally forced to confront, like, OK, it's not as good as we think it is. This kind of patterns of endemic sexual violence are, in fact, really ingrained and just haven't been talked about as loudly as they should. So Rishi, it's like kind of like in this like halfway generation with her friends where they're entering the sexual landscape with the sobering knowledge of Me Too, like the girls go into this with a hatred of men. They make jokes to the effect of like, we hate men. Like they even use the word Me Too quite flippantly as a verb to describe like, oh, we're going to go Me Too this guy's ass if he does something. So they they are like aware of the dangers of what they're going into. And the institutions around them are sort of scrambling to keep up. Like there is a really comic scene early on in the book where everyone is required to take sex ed, which to Rishi is hilarious because like this might be like the one opportunity to get everyone together into a room and be like, don't assault each other, don't traumatize each other, like be safe. But instead, it's done in a pretty hilarious and boring way. And Rishi ends up like skipping to go smoke weed. So she doesn't even stick around for the lesson. But I think that like something that I wanted to push out with this book is that none of the cases of violence at the hands of men are of a form that is recognizable as like a dude in an alleyway like grabs you or like getting mugged by a stranger or something or not even necessarily by someone who is like a violent abuser. But a lot of it does boil down to some degree of mutual incomprehensibility. Again, like Rishi has a adverse interaction with a man at the end of the book where they both walked away from that scenario with very different ideas of what happened, which I think is true for many women who like would consider themselves survivors of some kind of violence. And Rishi at the time tries to justify it to herself. She wonders if maybe she again blames their algorithms, like maybe what he was seeing showed him a certain sexual norm and what she has been growing up observing is something totally different. I think that these are like uncomfortable questions I've had in conversations with friends like off the record, but not seen portrayed in fiction. So I think I wanted to do that. [Francesca] Yeah. And it seems strange in many ways that Gen Z has grown up with so much sex ed and yet there seems to be such an anti-feminist backlash that has occurred and men have often not stepped up to the plate. At least that's what it appears. What's been your experience and why do you think this has happened? [Malavika] I think that we are experiencing what could be some kind of what people have described as like interregnum between like two sort of like periods of social norms. Because like on one hand, I think like men still operate with a level of entitlement, but that is not backed up by the material realities of a lot of women. Like women at this point tend to be more educated than men, out earning men. Like the playing field has shifted in weird ways. And I think this old order is trying so desperately to defend itself. And I think it's no surprise that like this is the moment that like being a trad wife is like a psyop that's being pushed on young women on social media, or even that we're having the rug politically pulled out from under our feet with like the reversal of Roe v. Wade and stuff. But I think that like despite these like what strike me as conservative attempts to put young women back in their place, like these trends of increased education and like financial mobility like are probably going to keep rolling. And I think that is going to result in like a gap between young men and women that I'm not sure can be healed in one generation. I think that for me and for Rishi, like the solution is to just not think about men and like we're queer. So that is like an option that like is the future for us. But yeah, it's a really hard question. I think it's hard to see how it's going to play out. [Francesca] So finally, I was really struck by something in the last page and also in the Acknowledgements, where you invoke Baldwin, James Baldwin's idea that reading reveals our supposedly unprecedented pain as a connection to others. And this came, I read this one day after I'd interviewed Nicholas Boggs, who has written a wonderful biography of Baldwin, and we spoke about that. So talk about, and she also says about herself, where she says, there are no happy endings. The best we can hope for is ambiguity. She feels that her feelings are slow and long and they will cause her pain, but also make her extra susceptible to art, which is, I think, something of what Baldwin was saying, as well as the pain creates a connection that we have with others. So I wonder if you could just elaborate on that. [Malakiva] Yeah, I mean, I think that James Baldwin is someone that I look up to personally as a massive inspiration. I'm actually so excited. I went to Nicholas Boggs' talk in New York recently. I bought the book, I'm reading it right now. I think that Baldwin is someone who also had really big feelings, a lot of drama, and suffered from a lot of interpersonal lore. And I think that he has a certain type of person in the world who I think a character like Rishi would probably relate to. In fact, a little Easter egg I even dropped in the book is that Rishi takes a James Baldwin class in college. But I think that that idea that some people, their orientation towards the world, just is that of deep feeling. And I think a lot of those traits cluster in maybe artists and also queer people, of which James Baldwin and Rishi are both. I think that for her, she will need, as a character, if I were trying to imagine what the future would hold for her, she would probably need more mentors and models of people who are able to transmute their big feelings into a lifestyle that is relatively sustainable, stable, and hopefully makes good art. And I do think that someone like James Baldwin, for her too, would probably be a big inspiration. [Francesca] And no doubt for you as well. Yeah. Well, it's a terrific book. I loved it wonderfully written, very funny. You have mentioned the humor. We haven't talked much about it, but I laughed out loud quite a few times. Unprecedented times. Malavika Kannan, thank you so much for talking with us. [Malavika] Thank you so much. Yeah, this was a really great conversation and really thoughtful questions. I really appreciated this. [Francesca] Laura Acomparo, welcome to Writer's Voice. I loved your book, The Animal Room. It's a very profound and loving look at the relationship we have with animals. It's really not a book about animals, The Animal Room. It's about people seen through the lens of our relationships with them. And also not just that, it's about people and their relationships with each other. And of course, we are animals. Tell us about this lens that you took and what moved you to take up that theme. [Laura] Since I was a child, I've always been fascinated by animals and stories about animals. I used to write those stories from when I could first pick up a pencil. All of my characters were rabbits, horses, dogs, cats, you name it. Typical for a child, I think. So many of the characters that we encounter in childhood fiction are animals. They're almost stand-ins for ourselves. However, the fascination never really went away for me. And as an adult, when I read the newspaper, if there's an article that features an animal in some way, shape, or form, I tend to save that article. There's something about those, especially instances when wildness encroaches upon our domestic lives. And this book is something that I knew I wanted to write for a long time, because I knew that I had ideas for stories based on the news, based on anecdotal stories that I'd heard, such as there was an incident of deer hunting in this suburban neighborhood where I live, and a conflict between neighbors that did happen. So I thought, you know, I really do need to collect fiction about animals, about our relationship with animals. What do they say about ourselves? And all of the different relationships that we have with animals, they're so varied and so complex and really based so much on the species and the context. And it can be everything from a treasured pet to a scientific lab animal, to our meal, we're eating meat or wearing leather or, you know, using therapy animals or putting animals to work, you know, on a farm or as a military help. It's just fascinating to me how we approach these other creatures that we share the planet with. F Yes. And so often, we don't really think about that connection. I know I have gone through an evolution in my understanding of my relationship with animals. What about you? [Laura] Absolutely. Going from romanticizing animals, as I mentioned, as children with, you know, our stuffed animals that we attribute magical qualities to. The Velveteen Rabbit was one of my favorite stories as a child, the idea of there being our companions and sort of angelic figures, of course, then the ice water shock of realizing that food on my plate was made from the animals that I loved. And then the complexities that come with understanding scientific research and how we use animals for our benefit and how they're exploited and also coming to terms with those complications. That's been a lifelong journey. And I think that if people are really honest about how we live with and exploit animals, it's a lot to get your head around and to have to be blind to a lot of suffering that happens. I was involved in animal activism when I was very young. I was like in middle school and my friends and I used to call up and complain about, you know, circus animals, etc. But, you know, that went away. And I'm not an animal activist. However, I am sensitive to animal rights. And rather than being an activist, I'm just writing about them. And I try to do so in a neutral way. [Francesca] Yeah. So let's actually start with that first one that is based on a real story. It is the first story in your book. And the theme is taken up from a different perspective in the last story as well. Tell us about this first one. You have Lee, who has just moved into a suburban area from New York City. And she has a next door neighbor, Daryl Metzger, who's a hunter. What is the story about? [Laura] Well, for me, it's about parenthood. It's about the feeling of protectiveness that comes from being a mother. That was the impetus for the story. And it also has a political undercurrent with the deepening polarization that's been happening politically in the country over the last couple of decades. And some paranoia that I have seen, that I have felt myself in looking at neighbors and being suspicious or skeptical about how they might see the world politically, how they might see me or my family, and how that can very easily devolve into a feeling of being under siege or under threat from neighbors, from other Americans. And it's something that I think has just been worsening and worsening. And I tried to combine that with the hormonal changes of pregnancy, and the mama bear instincts of being a parent of young children, and how those things together can be an explosive combination, as we see with Lee, who is spiraling into a really extreme place where she's starting to imagine things about her neighbor that may or not be real, and how dangerous she imagines he could be, just based on the fact that she's discovered he's been hunting in her backyard, which he's legally allowed to do. And he has a little bit of an attitude when he speaks with her at the block party that she takes as an anti-woman attitude that he has, that she takes as insulting or condescending and worse. And her husband is not able to bring her back from the brink of imagining the very worst about this next door neighbor. And I decided to tell that story as almost a suburban horror story of a woman who is possibly losing her mind, or possibly truly under threat. And so I tried to keep that ambiguity intact until the last sentence. You mentioned Lee in the first story, Harvest, and her next door neighbor, Daryl, who is the villain in that story. The last full story of the book, called Pack, is told from Daryl's perspective. And that was the most fun story that I wrote in this book, taking Daryl's perspective. He's a retired police officer, training a new police dog. And he, just like everyone, is the hero of his story and is well-intentioned and wants to do good in the world. He's trying to serve as a protector and behave as he thinks a man should behave. I think that that's important to see both how he comes across to his next door neighbor, to a woman next door who finds him condescending and threatening, and how he sees himself and where those may or may not mesh. And then the very last tiny story in the collection shows the two of them now talking it out a little. [Francesca] There's a recurring theme identified in these stories, and that is about care. All these characters have a different perspective to care. Lee is caring about her kids. Daryl is trying to do good in the world, as you just said. You have a wonderful story, Sentinel, which is about a young woman who thinks she is a canary. And she's being cared for by a psychotherapist, somewhat unsuccessfully. And she eventually goes to another therapist, who takes a very different approach to care. I found this very interesting because it's a story just on many levels of an older man who is seeing his way of doing things change and new ways coming in and not sure how he feels about that. A young woman who's kind of identified as a canary in the coal mine of the world that we have. So tell us about this story and these two different approaches and what you thought about them, approaches to care. That's very interesting what you pointed out about care being an underlying theme through the book. And I think you're right. Every story features a character who cares deeply about something, sometimes to an extreme. And every character I write has really good intentions and they often go astray. However, with Sentinel, yeah, I mean, I think you just put your finger right on it. The canary in the coal mine of the way that the world is changing, the way that mental health is conceived these days, rather than how it used to be treated and thought of. Having been a former psychotherapist myself, and one who lived in a time where the transition you're talking about was just really beginning to happen. That is one idea of care being very much top down from the expert to the patient, which I did not like. And I was much more interested in going from the other point of view, starting from where the patient was, even with working with patients on developing their own treatment plan, for example. So I just was curious about how you dealt with the new and the old, the young and the old, and what that meant for you. The seed for the story came from a book that I had read, which I can never remember the title of, but it was about the brain and about the strangeness of the brain. And it was anecdotes about different phenomena or conditions or just stories. And there was one that always stayed in my mind, unsurprisingly, because it featured the idea of an animal. And it was about a patient somewhere in the Middle East. He was convinced that he was becoming a tiger, and he would look in the mirror and actually see his face becoming the face of a tiger and feel and see claws coming through his hands. And what a story, what a phenomenon. And the idea of lycanthropy, which is the werewolves that we all have heard of. And there is the phenomenon of someone feeling as if they are a different species, another kind of animal, or identifying so strongly that it's hard to know. Does the person believe that they are the animal? Or do they just identify with the features of that animal in a strong way? And I think that's such an interesting thing to think about. And with radiating meaning about what does it mean to try to access or interpret someone else's subjective identity and feeling? And so much is being discussed right now about identity and subjectivity. And it is not the place of others to label or tell someone what their identity actually is, what they feel inside, and how that's very difficult for someone in the medical field to deal with. And I wanted that story to remain. Again, I always try to keep the ambiguity because it really is, it's not an easy answer. He sees it very black and white, the older psychotherapist, like this is a case of zoanthropy. It's a subset of schizophrenia. Here's a patient who needs treatment, and it's not up to her. I'm telling her she needs this treatment to be able to live a normal life as a human being, as a young woman growing up in the world and going to college and doing her classes. And she's going into a birdcage and eating seed, and that's not okay. The younger caregiver comes from the newer approach, co-creating a regimen of care and not just labeling something black or white, schizophrenia, who's to say? Who's to say what's delusion? It's a spectrum of health, and it's very difficult to pinpoint what's healthy, what isn't. I keep coming back to these questions. I find them very interesting. [Francesca] Well, in some ways, there are also questions about how we relate to animals, because one is from a point of view of dominance, and the other one is from the point of view of collaboration or equality in some way. I mean, when we, you know, talk about the animal rights movement, we're talking about animals as persons. And I think it's actually the same controversy, or it comes from the same place. Both of them, in their own way, are thinking about how do we relate in a way that is good towards others? But one of them, I think it might be a more successful way of going forth in this world of extinction than the other. [Laura] Absolutely. Yeah, the dominance isn't working out so well. We have to figure out a way to collaborate, both with the animals around us and with one another. [Francesca] Exactly. Another story that gets to that idea, and they come back and they're telling their friends, another couple about the safari. And here was another story in which I started out kind of judgmental, and ended up just thinking, well, it makes a lot of sense what they're saying. I can be there myself. I am there myself. And how we deal with privilege in this world, I think, is very much at the heart of it. So I don't want to tell you about your stories. You tell me about that. You're so good at it. [Laura] You are. You are a fantastic reader, really thoughtful and perceptive. I appreciate that. Yeah, this is, you know, I love to travel. My family, we travel as much as we can. And whenever we do, you know, I mean, I'll just go full on tourist whenever we're going. I love it. You know, as a younger person, as a jaded teenager, I didn't want to ever come across as a tourist. I'm over that. You know, now we go out and go into the gift shops and I do all the tourist things. And I just I love it. And I'm so grateful that we are able to do that. I appreciate it. And I do think it expands the view of the world and makes us more sensitive and empathetic people and just better educated people in the world. However, of course, tourism comes with so many layers of complicating ethics in terms of I mean, we were in Barcelona a couple of years ago and right before they started squirting water guns at tourists because they were overrunning the city and ruining the atmosphere of the old town. We have many, you know, there's so many debates that can go on about about tourism and what the benefits and the drawbacks and what is the middle ground? How can we be harmonious and be able to visit places while not destroying those places and being sensitive to the residents? And, you know, Africa, I've never been there myself. This story was done completely by online research and reading books and talking to people. But that's got its own set of complications and Safari in particular, you know, coming and it's too rich to not include in this book, you know, with the idea of viewing animals as commodities, almost, you know, the idea of, oh, I saw the lion check, you know, I saw the wildebeest check, you know, getting the bucket list item and animals are on the bucket list of the Safari that you need to have seen, the hyena and have to see a kill check, you know, this idea that you can accrue, accumulate experiences as part of a well-lived life or, as you mentioned, privilege, a privileged life. And how do we see people of other countries or of other races? Is there a sense of, are we exploiting the animals? Are these tourists who are going on Safari in Africa to some low resourced places? Are they exploiting those people? Or is it beneficial by bringing tourism dollars to communities that desperately need that and really rely on that? And of course the tourists in question who go on the Safari discover the rhinoceros poaching problem in South Africa and are horrified by that. But, you know, the undertone is they come to learn that very, very poor people in Mozambique are poaching for the rhino horns in order to make money. There's just a lot for them to think about or for them to, or for the reader to think about, I should say, whether to them it seems like a cut and dry ethical problem that the rhinoceroses are being slaughtered. But there's another side as well. Yeah, there is actually. And there are controversies over conservation itself. And again, the same issues of approach towards conservation, whether it's something you helicopter in about and just care about the animals, but not the people who are around the animals and other ones that really fully engage the people who live in those areas to try to resolve some of those contradictions. So it was an exploration of, as you mentioned, privilege, the complications of tourism and of conservation and the romanticization of animals as well. [Francesca] Yes, but I was also struck by the real sincerity that I felt, particularly in the character of the wife who had been on Safari, who was very much as told through her. She's deeply moved. It's a confident, there's something real and authentic there and something that she has learned from. It has changed her view of the world. It truly has. And so, you know, it's not somebody we can sneer at. These are the relationships, these are the objective institutions and relationships and class systems and economic systems we live with. And maybe the more we do contact each other, the better. [Laura] I'm happy that you said that, that these are not characters to sneer at because I did write the story in a sort of light satire. However, it wasn't meant to be purely satirical. There is an authenticity there and these characters were not meant to be sneered at. I think some people have read that story as parody, as satire. That's not how I meant it. I meant those characters to be more sympathetic than I'm afraid they came across to some readers. But I'm glad to hear that you read it the way I intended. Francesca Rheannon So, final question. This is a book very much about how people relate to animals, but of course also how people relate to the animals that are other people. The lessons in the book, I don't mean lessons in the kind of dreary way at all, but the lessons that I took from the book, the things that it made me think about ethical stances. And there's also the whole question of how we deal with each other as people. How we deal with animals is a mirror on how we deal with each other in this world. And I just wonder if there's some thoughts you might leave us about that after having written this book. [Laura] I think that there's a real parallel. The animals that are the closest to us are the ones that we're quickest to protect and treasure and seek to understand. We keep our pets and we know everything about them and are very sensitive to their needs and do our best to care and understand them. Animals that are in a farm in the Midwest that are being mistreated, they're out of sight and are an abstraction. We are not spending as much time or energy thinking of those animals and what they may be experiencing. And the same is true of humans. The humans that are in our close vicinity, our neighbors and our family, very closely attuned to, we care for deeply or at least are willing to extend effort or care for. And whereas halfway across the world, you're about a humanitarian crisis, it's abstract and it's hard to comprehend. And it takes a lot more to care or make concrete actions to ameliorate. Those closest to us are the ones to which we tend to extend care and the ones that are far are more abstract. And the same is true of humans as animals. And we forget that we're as connected to them as we are to the people that we know. [Francesca] Absolutely. Well, Laura Acampora, I want to thank you so much for telling us about your wonderful collection of stories, The Animal Room. I look forward to more from you. Thanks again. Thank you so much, Francesca. That's been great.