Totally Booked: LIVE! In this special episode of the podcast (in-person at the Whitby Hotel with a live audience!), Zibby interviews New York Times bestselling author Amy Bloom about I’LL BE RIGHT HERE, a sweeping multigenerational story that begins in occupied Paris and spans 50 years. She reflects on her signature themes (family, love, sex, and death), the moral complexity of her writing, and her fascination with found families, marginalized characters, and hidden histories. She also touches on the impact of her memoir, IN LOVE, which tells the story of her late husband’s Alzheimer’s and death.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome back to Totally Booked Live. I'm here today with Amy Bloom. I'm so excited. Welcome. Yay clap. 

Amy: Oh, yay. Thank you. 

Zibby: Um, Amy is la, her latest book is, I'll Be Right Here. And I interviewed Amy before for her last book In Love, which is like one of my favorite books. Has anyone read that book here in the so good.

Oh my gosh. Okay. I'll read you her bio and then we'll get into this new book. Uh, Amy Bloom is the author of four previous novels, white Houses, lucky us away and Love invents Us, and three collections of short stories where the God of Love hangs out. Come to me finalist for the National Book Award and A Blind Man Can See How Much i Love You finalist for the National Book Critic Circle Award.

Her first book of nonfiction, normal transsexual CEOs, co cross-dressing, cops, and hermaphrodites with attitude is a staple of university sociology and biology courses. Her most recent book is the widely acclaimed New York Times bestselling memoir In Love. She has written for magazines such as The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Vogue L, the Atlantic Slate and Salon, and her work has been translated into 17 languages.

Amy: All true? 

Zibby: All true few. They got it right. All right, I'll be right here. Can you tell everybody what this book is about? 

Amy: Sure. Um, my, I can,.. 

Zibby: Would, would you also please do that now? 

Amy: I was thinking, I was thinking about it on my way over here. Um, my kids say that I only have four topics. Um, and depending on which kid you ask, they would say family, love, sex, and death.

I feel like that's plenty. I, I feel like I have covered the waterfront. Um, and that's what the book is about. It's about. It begins in occupied Paris, um, I should say. Well, because we're all friends, I should say. I was beginning a historical novel, which was my mandate from my publisher. And so there's a great deal about, um, occupied Paris during the war and our central protagonist, a woman named Gazala, who is French born, but of Algerian parentage.

Um, becomes basically the dog's body and tweney of Colette. The writer, Colette had always been a favorite writer of mine and also seemed to be one of those terrible great monsters that you read about. My favorite story of Colette is she is entertaining a lot of very fancy people at her family's home in Burgundy, and they are late.

And she is hungry. So she eats the tops out of the deviled eggs and the custard out of the acls and leaves them there for, for the late I guests, I thought, well, how do you not wanna get to know this woman better? Um. Also, she was sort of a cheerful, bourgeois, polite Parisian antisemite for most of her life.

And then she fell madly in love with her third husband who was Jewish. And so the story of her evolution and her struggles with the Germans and hiding Maurice for 18 months. Really captured me. And so I put Gazala into that world. And when the war is over, gazala comes to America and she finds two girls who live across the street over the bakery, um, which is where she has come to work.

And they are Alma and Ann Cone, and the three of them become best friends. And then her brother returns from Algeria and now they are four best friends. And later on. One more friend joins the group and they are known in their family as the greats because they are, of course, you know, the grandmother.

They are the great aunt. They are the great uncle. And it covers about 50 years in a, in a family's life. Um, I think the other thing I tend to write about, because it's interesting to me, um, are found and made families, I am deeply attached to the family I was born into and the family that I gave birth to but I am also really interested in who comes in from the wings. You know that cousin to whom everybody is very attached for 10 years, who then moves far away, or the person who has been far away. And suddenly makes a connection with your sister, and now this person is at every family holiday and half the time you're still thinking, where did you come from?

You know? Um, so all of those things came together for me and it is really portraits of everybody in the family and the weaving in and the weaving out. I think the other thing is that I did not come from a family. My parents and grandparents were uh, I, I think old school would be the polite way to describe it.

Um, silent on the subject of their personal histories. And so, you know, I would say at one point to my mother's mother, to my grandmother, you know, grandma, I see, like, I know my uncles here in America, but I see in this photograph that when you left Russia, you had eight siblings, and when you came to America you had four.

To which I would get a response that was something like, Ah-huh, I found that interesting. I found the closed doors compelling. And so part of this novel is really a way to write about the fact that our parents and our grandparents are so mysterious to us that we do not know who they were before we came on the stage.

And I wanted to write about what people are willing to share, what people keep closed forever. And how that affects the family's life. That's what I think. 

Zibby: That was a great cab ride. Uh, you know, pitch development. 

Amy: Thank you. 

Zibby: Check plus. Oh my goodness. What did you end up finding out about your own family?

Amy: Well, not as much as I would've liked. Um, my, um, the other, my other favorite story about my, my mother's mother. For whom English was, I think, a fourth language and just tired of it by then. You know, she was like, I have learned languages. And so, you know, we, I said to her, so what was it like in the old country?

And she goes, uh, not so nice. I said, well, what about here? Nice. So that was, that was my maternal side of the family, that, that was that. And, um, my grandfather, my father's father, had the distinction of being deported from Russia. Not something that happened that often for being depending on which relative you asked.

Um, a terrific hell raiser and, and union organizer, which we were all quite pleased with. Also, it seemed to me a not very talented burglar. Um, so combining his two loves, he came to America and, uh, I went to work in a factory. So the stories from the past I like and I liked. I found a letter from my dad from my 21st birthday, which really delighted me. This was not a man who was really put on earth to have children. I mean, he did his best. It wasn't a great idea. It was alright. Uh, I mean it worked out good DNA, um, as he himself would say, excellent, DNA and I would be like, yes, but he'd like, no, no. Um, but he was an enormously curious person.

I mean, there is nobody he met that he was not interested in. And I feel like that was really part of the DNA and in his letter to me on his 21st birthday, he said, it's okay to hate things and institutions. He said, especially institutions and especially policies that hurt other people. He said, don't be sorry if you hate them.

He said, just don't forget to do something about it. So that is also probably folded into the novel as well. 

Zibby: That's so interesting. Um, to back up for a minute about In Love Your memoir, you wrote so beautifully, and obviously we'll stick mostly on this, but just for context, if people haven't read it before so beautifully about your, your late husband's Alzheimer's and his decision to take his life with dignity and you're a set, you know, helping with that and writing about that and his telling you you had to write a book about it and how you were not, when people would ask you, you know, did you want to? And you were like, no, no, he, he didn't ask me to be told me to. Um, and so you did, you shared all of this about your life when really you're mostly writing and fiction. How did that experience of writing about it change things?

And how did it help you? How did it, if at all, change your approach to writing fiction afterwards? 

Amy: If I'm lucky, I'll never write a memoir again. Um, it was not my goal and it really was true. People would say in interviews in a very lovely manner, oh, did your husband ask you to write about this? And I would be like, no, no. He didn't ask me. He said, you're a writer. You gotta write about this. So he said, if we had a leaky faucet and you were a plumber, I'd ask you to fix it. You have to write about this. And so I did. Um. And I certainly shared more of myself than I am inclined to in fiction. And, um, when I first started writing fiction, I thought that I could hide.

I thought that I could create these interesting characters who were not me, as it turns out, not, not me, um, and that I could keep myself to myself, which is my preference. Um, this public speaking is all fairly hard won. It is not actually my nature. And I think. Returning to fiction was first of all, a certain kind of relief.

It's like, oh, good. I don't have to make any embarrassing announcements about my own personality. But it's also coming to terms at this point in my writing, with the fact that whoever you are, whatever you are writing yourself, will leak out. It will come out in the little round spaces of the A's and the E's.

It will just, you cannot hide who you are. I remember, um. You know when. I remember when Philip Roth died. I was on a couple of panels because I was a great admirer of many aspects of his work. And you know, somebody said to me, well, do you really think that people's personalities come out? And I said, yes.

Nobody ever read Philip Roth and said to themselves, boy, if I were down with the flu, this is the guy I'd really want bringing me a bowl of suit. No said, no one ever. You know, I don't think it's a bad thing, and it doesn't even speak to whether or not the man might have been. Completely great as a caregiver, but you cannot keep who you are from the reader.

And I think, I don't try as hard now, it's like, you know when you have a novelist who says to you, oh, it's all made up. They are lying when you have a memoirist who said This is exactly what happens, they're also lying. You know, because we're writers, so we drag ourselves with us. You know, just like everybody else does, you know, in every conversation, you know, you are, you, you, I mean, one makes an effort, as my mother would've said.

Um, when I was in the green room, I was brushing back my hair and I could hear, I could feel my mother's hand, right? Just, just off your face, darling. Off your face. And I feel like, you know, they come with us, we come with us, they come with us in, in whatever form the writing is. 

Zibby: I can't believe you said this doesn't come naturally to you.

I feel like I'm just sitting here watching like a standup show and I could just watch you all day. 

Amy: Happy to hear it.

Zibby: Um, okay. Well, on a, on a more serious note in the book, there is so much about obviously anti-Semitism, about the Holocaust, more than just anti-Semitism, but the extinction of Jewish people and how, um, one girl tried to take some matters into her own hands by, you know, one by one sort of steal saying goodbye to some German men, which we could talk about.

Amy: I'd be happy to, because those, those, those are based on real people. Really. Yeah. So in, in the novel and you know, Zale is trying to find her way as a human being. And part of what I wanted to write about, you know, is that I grew up with a part of my family is, is French, and I grew up with a lot of stories about the French resistance, you know, which if you read the first person accounts from the early 1950s, it sounds like 97% of the country was engaged in resistance.

Hmm. More like two, so. But there were these two girls who were tremendous heroes in World War 2. They were, they were Dutch girls, they were teenagers, and they were in the resistance. And their form of resistance was, this is a little dark, I should warn this is not cheerful. And so they walked past, um, the German soldiers and they're like.

Hi. And the German soldiers naturally, you know, foreign guys in another country go, hi. They go, wanna take a stroll? And they go, sure, let's take a stroll. And they walk through sort of, I guess, the Dutch equivalent of the bo de Bologna and into the, into the groves of trees. And then they slit the German's throats and roll up their skirts and off they go.

And they were tremendous heroes and they did this more than once. And I really wanted to write about that. I thought, what is it? To be a 16-year-old girl in an occupied country and decide that this is the thing you can do, not delivering maps on your bicycle. People did that. Not handing over a code, not just trying to protect your parents, but that you could actually be a fighter.

And I was very taken with that. So I use that story, but I always try to make it really clear. This is not a story I made up. 

This is based on on history of World War ii. 

Zibby: It was not your own experience? 

Amy: No, it was not my own experience. 

Zibby: Oh, we have to ask after your last there, there is, just have to ask. 

Amy: Yeah.

Oh, I don't think there's a lot in there. That's my own experience. Um, although there is, I think, a very entertaining section of a early, like late 1970s feminist consciousness raising group that is based on my own experience and it's. From my point of view. Hilarious. 

Zibby: How do you feel in this climate of antisemitism here in the US and everywhere with this book coming out?

Are you, how do you feel about it? 

Amy: I would say about myself as a writer. I don't write. To recommend, and I say that partially 'cause I've often gotten letters from people saying, how could you let this happen? Or Why did you choose to describe this? Or, you know, the wicked are not punished and the good are not rewarded.

And I'm like, entirely correct. That would be consistent with my life experience, right? The bad are not necessarily punished. The good are not necessarily rewarded for me. I don't think of myself as a political writer at all. But I think there is enough of a shift in the world that now I feel to write about women as people, to write about Jews as people, to write about people of color as actual human beings turns out to be, for me, unexpectedly a political stance.

It had not occurred to me that the world would be shifting in such a way that any of those viewpoints. Would have more impact than just being the basis of how I, you know, how I tend to operate and see the world and, um, I feel more than I have, I think in the past that it is important. It's important to tell the truth which one wants to do in writing, which is not necessarily about the facts, but about things that are true.

And also my view of the world is that this is a big, extraordinary bouquet that we are handed in this lifetime, and I do not see it as my job to pluck out some of the flowers and trample them underneath. 

Zibby: Okay, beautiful. When you were writing about the close relationships, especially the brother and sister relationship mm-hmm.

Talk to me a little bit about that and how you structured that, the varying layers of their relationship, all of it. 

Amy: So, uh, gazala has a brother Samir, who's her big brother, and he is in fact not her biological brother. He is brought into the family. As a baby when his mother dies in childbirth and their Gonzales's mother is his mother's best friend.

And so they grow up together. And I think especially for people who have had what we would now call deeply traumatic childhoods, you know, like a war and an invasion and the death of your parents, um, there is a very particular bond that can be formed, certainly between parents and children and also between siblings, and they are just.

Uh, there's a Greek myth, gosh, Baus and Phil Amine whose, whose greatest wish, right? When the, when the fish jumps out of the ocean and grants them, their magic wish is that they would be together forever. And so they become bushes and their roots are entwined and their branches are entwined. And that's how I think of this brother and sister, that they are the center of each other's lives and it allows them to be a very strong base for others.

But they are always at the center for each other. 

Zibby: I love that. And I love the Cohen sisters and the whole family. 

Amy: Love the cohen sisters 

Zibby: and I mean, they're like a comedy act in the middle of the, in the middle of the novel. How did that come about? 

Amy: Well, again, you'd have to speak to a lot of my dead relatives, but the, um, but there is a moment.

I, I actually, I have a big, I have a big sister. Um, this is a woman who only stopped introducing me to people as Baby Amy in the last 10 years. And I said to her, you have to stop. I said, you make, you make us sound like Betty Davis and Joan Crawford. It's like it's upsetting to people. And she says, well, that's how I see you. So in, in the, in the, in this whole section, in the early 1950s, I really wanted to write about New York Post World War II because it was a period of such, you know, on one hand such constriction socially, but also people who had been released and were actually going to be able to move forward. And there is a moment where I stole a line from my sister's mother-in-law. I don't know what that would mean. She is, to me, I'm sure there's a word in Yiddish, but I don't know what it is. But, um, and so she would say very sternly during a conversation if you said something that she thought was untoward. I mean, it could have been anything. It could have been, you know, aunt so-and-so's new hairdo, or you know, da da, whatever it is that, you know, uncle Archie was doing.

And she would say very repressively. I could make a remark and I just, that just stayed with me. And so I had to build an entire scene in the Cone Family apartment, you know, where they moved down from the Bronx around. I could make a remark and I felt like it was sort of like a combination of like the worst of the KGB and sort of borsch belt comedy, you know?

Zibby: Are you working on another project now? 

Amy: My publisher must have sent you. 

Um, I have two things that I am working on, um, and one of them that, that will happen more immediately is actually next year. I have my first mystery coming out. I love mysteries. I always used to read them for like, just kind of mind.

Candy and, um, I, the mysterious press was nice enough to buy it and they said, oh, we like this character very much. How about two more? 

Zibby: Ooh. 

Amy: And I said, sure. I think what they liked is when I, um, when I was an undergraduate. Um, uh, one of my gigs, this was back in the day, you didn't have to be 21. I was a bartender for like the alumni events, and because I was the most junior member of the staff, my job was to, they would say, wake up the alumni who are still here.

I don't think that's what they meant. I think what they meant is. Make sure nobody is dead. And so, uh, you know, and I'd wake up the gentleman, I'd say, oh, Mr. So and so, time to go home. And either he would get up or he wouldn't. And I thought, what a great setting for a murder. So, um, in the murder, uh, in the murder mystery, I have a disgraced English professor who takes up being a private eye and is called into her alma mater.

For the, um, death by Bludgeoning with a bronze bust of Nathaniel Hawthorne. So that's the next one. 

Zibby: Amazing. Um, Amy, thank you so much. Congratulations. 

Amy: This was a pleasure.