Zibby interviews author Angelica Baker about WHEN WE GROW UP, an electrifying novel about six longtime friends whose tropical vacation is interrupted by an unexpected crisis, forcing them to ask how strong their bonds really are. Angelica describes the false missile alert she experienced in Hawaii, a harrowing moment that sparked this book’s premise and shaped its themes of fear, self-discovery, and the messy dynamics of adult friendships. Angelica also reflects on how writing this book made her think profoundly about loyalty, regret, the passage of time, the weight of our decisions, and what it truly means to “grow up.”

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Angelica. Thank you so much for coming on to discuss When We Grow Up, a novel.

Congrats. 

Angela: Thank you. 

Zibby: Okay. Your book opens They're a bunch of friends sitting in Hawaii who get a notice that an inbound missile is on the way and they might die. And oh my gosh, what do you even do with that? Tell listeners about the book, where this idea came from, the whole thing. 

Angela: So this, people might know if they're listening, this happened in January 2018.

This is not a made up circumstance. And when it happened, I was on a vacation with people I had known since I was 12 years old. And they are. Sort of my, my wider group of friends from high school, many of them have stayed really, really close and they travel together every year. In January, and I had actually not gone on the January trip at that point in like 10 years, and it was right after I had my first book had come out and my husband and I were engaged.

He was in Japan doing research for the year. So I've been on my own in New York for a couple months. I was going to Japan and I was just kind of like, you know, why not? I'll go on this trip with my high school friends. I hadn't seen some of them in like five years. And that happened the first morning. And so really weird feeling of both that it was your, your mind kind of like rejected.

Whatever sort of bigger things you think you would do in a near, it was a near death situation, but you weren't reacting that way because it was kind of like, well, what it was just like, well, we're waiting to see. And you're also your mind wanted to think it wasn't real because as it turned out, it wasn't.

So that was the likeliest outcome, but it was just so such a massive thing to try to wrap your mind around. And then I also had this feeling of like, well, I mean, these are the people who have known me longer than almost anyone else in my life, but also like I hadn't seen some of them in five years. So I was like.

Maybe it's appropriate that we're all going to die together, but it also feels really weird. So, it only lasted for 45 minutes and even before the official 45 minute mark when we got the follow up message that it had been a mistake. We were all on Twitter. There were reporters on Twitter who had called Central Command in Hawaii or something, so we had figured out it wasn't real, but it was this kind of thing where we all just kind of sat there frozen.

We were like, well, I don't know, what are we going to do with this? And so, So, that was the original kind of spark. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. You wrote in the beginning. But when she looks up at everyone else, they're in motion, flitting back and forth between the house and the deck. No one else is sitting still or even sitting down.

She tries to refuse the terror any space to rampage, holding herself still. The way you might hold a glass of water high in the air during an earthquake's initial lurch. Because all the possibilities are laughable, right? The image of, what, of dying? The image doesn't exist in her brain. It's an unwelcome specter, scorched from the edge of a future photograph.

If the missile hits the ocean right now, then what? When will she be dead? How long will she sit here first, wondering exactly how much time she has left? Love that. 

Angela: This disaster movie scenario and, and your brain does not, does not really widen to take into account what if you're in a disaster movie. Like it just, it feels, so then you're making these jokes and you're kind of underreacting.

If it's real, you're sort of like both over and underreacting at the same time. And it was, you know, it's. It was surreal, and then it was nothing, which was also kind of like the perfect topper at that point in time. It wasn't even real danger. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. And then, of course, you go into the relationships between the characters and lust and comfort and friendship and loyalty and all of that.

So take me through that and what was going on with your friends. 

Angela: So that was the very, so that was the very initial idea. Just that kind of moment of, of getting that news and wondering if you're about to die and looking at the people you're with. And then obviously in real life, our trip proceeded and was totally fun and pedestrian and, you know, nothing, nothing, nothing bad happened, but I started thinking about that moment, sort of what it would reveal to a group of people where there were all these other tensions kind of already flying high at that point in time. By the very first morning of the trip, things are already tense. Claire, as it turns out, and this is not really a spoiler because it's revealed on like page five, but she is, has for the first time cheated on her husband on this trip.

So that's already happened. And so she has this moment of feeling like. If only I could just say that like, I did this after this because this would be sort of an excuse for this bad behavior and one of the kind of running things in the book is that they're all kind of always looking for excuses for bad behavior and so they kind of seize on this first morning where everything feels wrong all of a sudden and that you know the the vibes are off for the rest of the trip people are feeling insecure and are embarrassed about the way they reacted and she's embarrassed about her behavior, which predates the sort of this horrible thing that happens.

So everybody's kind of from that point on just the ground beneath their feet doesn't feel solid anymore. And so I was really, even though that wasn't really what happened in real life, I was really interested. I just had that image of these people sitting in this room. Waiting to see if they were going to die and then being like, oh, we have to spend another week here together.

Like we kind of all just want to like split up right now and go our separate ways and not talk about the fact that this just happened, but now we're going to spend a week together. And there's also 15 years of baggage and tension and history predating this missile text that we got that's sort of also coming into play.

Zibby: Wow. And why did you decide to put it in third person? 

Angela: Yeah, it was kind of a question when I first started writing this book, because my first book is in the third person because it moves between five or six different women. I mean, it's, it's very much sort of, 

Zibby: Wait, talk, talk a little more about your first book and just give us the general. 

Angela: Book is called Our Little Rocket and it takes place in September, 2008.

It's another kind of very specific moment in a real world timeline. And it's not that book in a similar way. It's not based on anyone real. It's sort of drawing from all these different ideas about real people in the real world that existed, but it is about the CEO of an investment bank whose bank fails in 2008.

But it is about the women in the community. So his wife, his daughter, their nanny, his wife's best friend, their daughter's best friend, and they all have sort of different, what interested me was writing about that time in New York and in Connecticut, which is where the book is set and writing about that time in the world of sort of the social world of finance, from the perspective of the women who have one foot in and one foot out, so they can realistically say they didn't know what was going on, but they're also very deeply woven into the fabric of this community.

And they're also very deliberately kept separate in a way that you know, the CEO of this investment bank exists in a very male dominated world. And his wife is very marginalized from that aspect of his life. So I was very uninterested in writing a financial thriller about the bank. And I was very interested in writing about the women that were sort of frustratingly sidelined, but also kind of saved from that, but also kind of cut out from putting together their own, um, Um, taking an ownership role in what was going to happen to them.

So that book, very logically to me, was in the third person because I felt like I wanted, it wasn't, I, the narrator wasn't omniscient. I wasn't sort of telling you all these things the women didn't know, but I was sort of darting between different women and different, you know, looking at the same scene through different perspectives.

For this book, it was, it was very different. I really wanted to stay. I did not want to give a portrayal of this group of friends that sort of took into account everybody's perspective. I was sort of from the beginning, I knew that I was going to be very, very close to Claire and her thoughts. And when you're let in on Mac or Jesse or someone else's thoughts, whether about Claire or about the situation, you're getting them however honest they're willing to be to her face.

You're only hearing about them really from her perspective still. So there was this kind of question for a while of whether I wanted to write it in the first person, but I just kept kind of resisting that in the very, very early drafts because she's at such an inflection point in her life where she's so mysterious to herself almost she's so kind of unhappy and not really clear on why she's unhappy and I think her husband is not on this trip.

You're hearing sort of little tidbits about their marriage from her in flashback and sort of little things she's thinking about throughout the book, but you only really hear from her husband. He calls her on the phone at the very, very end of the book. And I just felt like she, in the first person, it, and, and again, this is very close.

It's a very close third. But she's just kind of not, she's kind of holding her thoughts at a distance because I mean, she's depressed. She's having a really hard time well before she goes on this trip. So that was something, it just felt more natural to me. And so once I kept realizing that in the early drafts, I just kind of went with that.

Zibby: I feel like sometimes people have to use this fear, right? Fear of what if to sort of jolt them back into handling the present a little bit differently. And whether that's this novel, which is an eventuality, right? Like this could have happened or this did happen to you or whatever, or just like those moments where you sit there and you're like, I'm going to die. I'm going to die. Do you know what I mean? Like, what do we do with all of that? Because, of course, to go on. We have to suspend belief, we have to like just put that out of our heads or we'd all just be, I don't know, crying. So what, what do you, what do we do with that? And where did you come out after really examining this?

Angela: I think that another thing that's really going on in the book is both, it's set in January 2018 because that is when this happened in the real world, but it's also a very specific moment where these are people who, you know, probably attended a women's march and were feeling sort of politically fired up about a year before this book takes place.

And that sort of initial fervor for whatever their sort of fears or, um, whatever's getting them, making them feel active and engaged politically or, you know, socially or whatever has sort of faded. And so then it's like, okay, well, this is now the next three years, four years, 10 years, 20 years. I mean, this is now, what are you going to do about this?

And something that really felt evocative to me about the missile alert and the the fake fakeness of it is that you are not actually in immediate danger, right? You guys are actually leading your life continuing as you were. The immediate danger is distant from you is not something, even though you briefly felt it is not real.

And so what are you gonna do with that? And how is this gonna propel you forward? And that is kind of one of the animating questions of the book where I don't wanna get too much into specifics of the end of the book, but there are a lot of things Claire could do when she gets home from this vacation, and actually one of her friends says to her at one point, you know, you can like, you can make some changes that aren't blowing up your whole life, you can kind of change a few things and go from there and see how it goes, and um, not just sort of throw yourself from one extreme to the other, and it's not, you know, the book leaves everyone in a very uncertain place, it's very unclear sort of where this This group friendship is going from this, you know, where Claire's individual relationships with people in this group, where the group as a whole, where they're sort of individual ways that they're interacting with their, their lives separate from each other.

You know, the roles they're playing in their own relationships separate from this group. There are a lot of directions that could go. And it really is kind of like you may, this may have no effect, right? Which is often what happens in real life. And I do think something I'm always kind of pushing against as a writer is there's like a real desire sometimes from people reading stuff to say like, well, you know, this has to, people have to make, do big, do big things and make big swings and do big actions. And that's actually not how most of us live our lives. For most, for the most part, and I'm interested in those, those kind of interstitial moments where, you know, there could be this big blowout or there could be this big, everything could change, but actually what happens, you actually keep fumbling along, making a lot of mistakes.

And I think that's dramatically compelling too, but it's more challenging than if you're writing a thriller where like everything that's happening is having huge consequences. And so that's kind of a challenge that I'm interested in with my first book, I was interested in you know, you're watching this family kind of implode in slow motion over six months.

It's not like a huge cataclysmic. And even if you look at where the family ends up. It's cataclysmic to the people inside. It doesn't look cataclysmic from the outside necessarily. You know, things have not changed as, you know, it's not like they're living on the street and he's in jail and, you know, they never speak to each other again.

It's just cataclysmic for the children experiencing it. So that's kind of an, a challenge that I always find myself butting up against. And I really wanted to do that with this too. It's not something where they don't fly home right away. The missile isn't real. They don't talk honestly about almost anything that's going on until the end.

They have this huge blowout fight and then they kind of just wake up the next morning and kind of agree to not talk about it, which also, to me, feels very accurate to kind of group friend dynamics. So that's kind of something I wanted to explore. 

Zibby: Do you feel like writing the book has helped you grow up a little bit?

Angela: It's so strange because I don't really identify with, most things, we're always joking about that I have to say this because I'm married and it was not, you know, my husband's always like, make sure you tell people, but I don't really identify with, there are a lot of things about Claire that I don't identify with, I don't feel like I wrote someone who is myself, but there is a sense of sort of rootlessness and I don't know.

She's turning 30. I was turning 30, you know, the year that I went on this trip. And I did kind of have this sensation of, I just published my first book. That was over. Like it had been this huge thing that I'd been working toward, you know, up until that year. And then it happened. And I had this feeling of like, from now on, all the choices I make are going to be like limiting, kind of narrowing my options going forward.

Instead of, when I was 22, it just kind of felt like, who knows? Like I do this and then I do this. And I was totally rootless in a way that was very scary. A lot of the time. I mean, when I was living in New York and trying to finish my book and extremely, extremely broke and, you know, just very precarious in a lot of ways that was rootless in a different way, but I just felt like I was turning 30.

And it was like, okay, if I make this decision, then I like have precluded six other ones, which is always true, but did not feel true to me when I was 22 in the same way. And obviously now I look at turning 30 and I laugh because since I turned 30, I've had two small children and so I'm like, well, yeah, things are things are really on a narrow track right now. I have two children under the age of three, but I don't think that's necessarily true. And even if it were true, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. I think it's just an absolute truth about growing up, but also just being in relationship with other human beings in the world.

Like you, you can't just do anything at any given time for your entire life. So it's, it's not. upsetting in the same way that it was, but it did, there was a moment and I don't know how much of it was just purely about aging and being, you know, a woman and turning 30. I mean, who knows, but it did feel very much when I was turning 30, like, okay, like I've made these decisions that I didn't know were decisions at the time.

And now it's kind of like, now I can't go back and make any other decisions, which is again, like the most obvious thing in the world, but I do think writing about this moment and this feeling, I think a lot of times I write about stuff that's, that's important to me, but I can't really write about it until a few years later, I can't really think through, like, it's kind of interesting to look at now where I'm like, I can't really remember this feeling of like feeling this kind of panic, but it's very much what the book is about.

So I do think sometimes it's like it just lags a couple years behind where it also is writing and publishing a book takes a while, so it makes sense, but 

Zibby: true. Have you been working on a new project since this or full in on this? 

Angela: So I always kind of blame my children for how long it took me to write this book.

And it's not really fair because I had time before I had children, but my first son was born in 2021 and my second son was born last year, 2024. And so I was, I think I was like just racing to get a draft of this finished before I had my first child. And then I sold this book in between, kind of right around the time I got pregnant with my second child, I think.

So then I was trying to finish a draft. My husband and I moved cross country. I was pregnant. We got here. I was working remotely. We had no childcare yet. And I was trying to finish this draft for my editor. I'd already sold it, but I was trying to finish the final draft for my editor. And then my copy edits were due.

I have pictures that with my second son where he's like asleep on my chest and I'm like on my computer. So it was so crazy, but I also think I had this false confidence where I was like, Oh, I like got this book finished during the period of time when I had two children, but I already had a complete draft for my first child.

And so now I'm trying to work on something new and I feel like it's, I just. It's completely from scratch, and it's such a different thing, and it's such a different part of the process, and I'm just like, oh my god, how am I ever going to do this? 

Zibby: Honestly, I don't even know how you were doing it to begin with.

I mean, I could not do anything. I, it was like hard to do my emails back then. It was like, so the fact that you're putting out works of creative fiction. 

Angela: So we'll see. I mean, who knows? Right. But it is right now. It does feel like this thing where the kind of like my husband and I think both my husband's also a writer, but very different.

He's a history professor. So he's also working on a book right now. And I think we both the thing that the kind of push pull that we both really struggled with in parenthood is that we both kind of require so much like quiet time. It's like that's kind of something you just never get again for a while.

I don't know. I don't know if your children are older and maybe that comes back, but like even, and, and we're so fortunate. I mean, we pay for childcare and have our children in daycare. And so technically do have time every day when they're not physically in the house, but it's just the amount of quiet time.

I feel like I need inside my head to start a brand new book as opposed to like, dive back in and keep editing something that already exists just feels so insurmountable right now. And so. 

Zibby: So now it's okay. It's not always the time to produce. Sometimes you need inputs, right? You're just getting all the inputs right now and then you can do something with it later.

But if you don't get out there and do the living, right. 

Angela: Yeah. 

Zibby: Any advice to aspiring authors? 

Angela: Well, following on what we were just talking about, I do think that just do it if not every day and there are going to be plenty of times in your life when you can't do it every day. But I heard, I wish I could credit who said this because someone said this a long time ago that like you just need to open the Word document all the time.

Zibby: Yeah. 

Angela: It's okay. If you're not getting meaningful work done every day for months or years of your life, but like, try to keep it at the forefront of your mind. Try to keep the notebook that you have in your, in your bag. That's only for this book. Like try to just keep it close to the top of your brain, even if you're not getting good work done on it and trust that.

That's going to pay off in the future when you have time, whatever that looks like, whatever that means when you can work on it, I think that's one thing. I think that's really important and helps you to take it seriously during, you know, when I was like 24 and out of grad school and trying to finish my first book, there wasn't especially, I mean, so many of the people around me were people I've gone to college with who had gone straight into finance or who were sort of like, I remember when I went back to school and was getting an MFA. The guys in finance were just like, I don't understand. Like what's, how does this work? Like, what's the, how is this going to pay off for you? Like, I don't know. It might not, but it helps you take it seriously in your head, which especially if you're not living around other people doing it, or if you don't have other writers that you can kind of, the amazing thing in New York was you could just go see a writer, talk about it every single night, if you wanted to people at every stage of the of the career trajectory of the process, and I think that really did feed me and was really important.

It can also make you feel, you know, when you're having a bad writing month, it can be terrible, but I think it helps you take it seriously to just be thinking about it all the time, even if you can't really be working on it all the time, and then the other thing is just to be reading all the time, like there's never I keep a log of what I'm reading and the times when I can look at, you know, I didn't read anything that month or something, or these like dark, I know I can remember that it was like, oh, that was, I mean, it was the first month postpartum or like, you know, a really bad time previously.

And I'm almost always reading all the time. 

Zibby: Oh, I love that. I love the log. I meant to, I always mean to do that, but I don't, but anyway, well, Angelica, congratulations. When we grow up, totally thought provoking and, um, beautifully written. So congrats. Okay. Take care. Thank you.