New York Times bestselling author Jean Hanff Korelitz joins Zibby to discuss THE SEQUEL, a deliciously fun, witty, and suspenseful read that gives readers an antihero to root for while illuminating and satirizing the world of publishing. Jean delves into her book’s meta elements, its dark humor, and how it plays off the success of her previous novel, THE PLOT. She also reflects on the quirks of the literary world, from book signings to writers’ residencies, and analyzes the motivations behind her morally complex characters. Finally, she touches on the pressures of being an author and the catharsis of writing about dark, transgressive behavior.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome back, Jean. Thanks so much for coming on Mom's No Time to Read Books to discuss The Sequel. Oh my gosh, I love this book. I was so excited to see the cover when you showed it to me in secret and then to be able to dig in and read it and devour.

Oh my gosh, it was so good. 

Jean: I know it's, it's the most meta cover I've ever seen, which is of course, totally appropriate for the book. 

Zibby: It's the most meta book. I mean, it is. It's the most meta book. I was like, And even the scenes when you, you talked about how people wait till the end of the signing line to like really get in there and talk to you, I've mentioned that now to a couple booksellers and everything and they're like, Oh yeah, it happens every time. And I'm like, really? 

Jean: Well, I did it once, you know, so I was very aware that I was doing it. doing it. And then, but the, the, the first time that I really learned about this phenomenon was not from personal experience. It was from a memoir by Richard Grant, the English actor.

And he was very, he was not very nice to these people. He, he had a mean name for them, which I won't share unless you beg me. And then I will, but he, he had a, he had a specific pejorative term for the people who wait at the end of the line, often letting people go in front of them. So, I'm, I am piggybacking on his smarmy term.

Come on, you know you want it. You know you want it. 

Zibby: Okay, let's hear it. Let's hear it. 

Jean: Oh god, this is him, not me. I would never say this. I'm much too nice a person. He called them the smellies. 

Zibby: Why? 

Jean: I guess he thought they had a particular smell. 

Zibby: Interesting. Okay. All right. Richard Grant. Okay. Richard Grant.

This is not to discourage anyone from ever getting in a signing line, by the way. 

Jean: Oh, my God. Absolutely not. This is, this is like, I am going to deceptively be at the end of the line just when the author thinks, Oh, just one more. And then I get to go have a martini or, you know, hang out with my college roommate who I never get to see.

And that person has a long personal history or wants to go over the things in your book that they feel were written especially for them. Because they once spent the summer in Northern Michigan, or their father went to the college that you went to, or whatever it is. And because I happen to write books with so much stuff in them, there seems to be something for everybody.

Zibby: Well, that was just one of the eight million funny things that you put in here. And I, there are a couple of passages I might read, but even the fact, even how you depict it a writer's residency, which I've never been to. And so hearing what it's like from your character's point of view and then like the haughtiness of some of the panelists.

Oh my God. It just, your sense of humor, it's dark, but it's so funny. It's so sharp. 

Jean: Well, somebody once pointed out to me that perhaps the reason that, that authors are so consumed with status within their author group is that there, there isn't much in the way of worldly reward. I mean, let's face it, even the most successful writers are, you know, making what my son's doing.

College classmates are making their first year in France, so I mean, we, perhaps we compensate with a focus on these teeny tiny little things like who got a star in Publishers Weekly and, and who got the big tent at the Writers Festival and who got invited to the Writers Festival. Not to mention whose line is longest.

I mean, they're, they're, I'm sure, as I know you're aware, the New York Times just did its 100 top books since the year 2000, and I was delighted to be asked to, to submit a ballot, which I did. And then they contacted me and asked me to write a little piece about one of the books that I had chosen, which was not anywhere in anybody's else's selection, let alone on the final list.

And, and when the author, Tom Parada, Uh, saw what I'd written, he emailed me, and we had this little exchange, and he said, there are just so many ways for us to kind of torture ourselves, and, you know, this, this is one of them. 

Zibby: So. The lists are like a blessing and a curse, right? 

Jean: They are. Yeah, I mean, we're all readers first, so, you know, we were all thrilled to, to evangelize about the books we love, but then in the back of their head, you're going like, am I going to be on this list?

I don't think so. And that's okay. 

Zibby: Okay, wait, let's go to what is your book about. 

Jean: Okay. 

Zibby: And especially for readers who did not read the plot and so then don't, can they read the sequel freestanding and just discuss maybe a line about the plot and then the sequel. 

Jean: Sure. So, you know, this is, was interesting for me.

I'd never written a sequel before, unless you count, uh, one of my novels, which is Did revisit a protagonist 20 years later, but nobody had read the first book. So we never called it a sequel. I had not realized how this question was going to kind of dominate. Is it a standalone? Is it a series? Do you need to read the plot first?

I didn't know that was a thing. So that's apparently a thing. So it's a good thing that you brought it up. I think we pretty much settled this question by calling it The Sequel. I think, you know, you can do whatever you want, but I think if you attempt to read the sequel without reading the plot, you're going to have no idea what's going on.

And you're also going to miss a lot of the fun. So set aside a day, read the plot first, or even better, listen to it. It's read very well by Kirby Haybourne, and then you can jump right into the sequel, which pretty much starts where the plot left off. I also think that the, the, the question is visually settled by the cover, which I know you have there.

Um, I mean, The sequel is literally resting on top of the plot. 

Zibby: It's so difficult. 

Jean: If there are any stronger signals from the author and publisher that you really ought to read the plot first, I don't know what they could be. So yeah, I, I, and that's, it's an interesting thing because I never even thought that this would come up.

I never. Thought I would get this question, but in Goodreads, I, I find that people are bringing this up again and again and again. Can I read it without reading the plot? Yeah, you can do whatever you want, but why would you want to? I mean, why would you, yeah, it's, it's just going to be so much more fun.

Zibby: Okay. So assuming most people have read the plot, but let's pretend one or two have it. Can you summarize the plot and then the sequel? And did you always know you, there was going to be a sequel or like, when did you realize you were going to do it? 

Jean: I did not know at all. I, uh, I finished the plot. I thought, Goodbye, I went on to another book, um, and then I moved about a year and a half ago and I think, I really think I was packing up my books in my apartment, um, and it just popped into my mind, I wonder what happens next, and, uh, and then I just, I, I, I called my agent and I said, you know, I'm thinking of writing a sequel to the plot, and she said yes, and we're going to call it The Sequel.

Which I just thought was the most hysterical thing. So in the plot, the plot focuses on a kind of a, a downwardly mobile writer, in that he had a modest success with his first novel and then couldn't get a second novel published and he's, he's bitter and he's angry and he's frustrated and he can't write.

And he ends up teaching in a pretty bad, MFA program in Northern Vermont. We're not talking the Iowa Writers Conference here, Columbia or Stanford. This is pretty much, you send us a check, we give you the degree, um, it's a low residency program. And in his, in his group of pretty awful writers, there's an incredibly arrogant young man who claims that the book he's writing on is going to be an Oprah selection, a national bestseller, uh, it's going to be a movie.

It's, you know, one hears this sort of thing, and one is skeptical, but in a private conference, this young man, um, tells his teacher, this failed writer, um, the plot of his novel, and the writer is consumed with bitterness because he knows that this kid is absolutely correct. There is no way to kill this absolutely phenomenal plot.

And, you know, it's kind of sad. We, none of us like to see wonderful things happen to awful people, but, you know, there are rules about this kind of thing and that's the way it is. Then a couple of years later, his career has, uh, descended even further and he makes a random discovery. That this young man has died, and he's died very soon after their meeting, so it's not as if he's written the book.

The book, as far as he knows, is unwritten, and it doesn't exist, and that leaves him with this kind of burning, he would term it a responsibility towards this abandoned plot, which he then writes into his own novel, theres no question of plagiarism here, as most people understand plagiarism, including myself. And his book, sure enough, becomes a massive bestseller and he is living the life that he always wanted.

And then at the apex of his success, an anonymous person contacts him to accuse him of being a thief and there begins a terrible descent into paranoia and vindication and, and increasingly disturbing discoveries. And that's about all I can say about that without ruining the plot. So the sequel pretty much begins within a month or two of the end of the plot and it follows some of the same characters and into almost like a Hall of Mirrors parallel experience of trying to figure out who knows what about them and trying to stop them before bad things happen.

And Boy, that sounds so awesome, doesn't it? You know, the problem with writing a thriller is you really don't want to ruin it for anybody and, uh, you end up like with this verbal problem. So, yeah, well. 

Zibby: One of the things about the sequel and not to give anything away from the plot or the sequel, but there is a theme of sort of loss and recovery and whether that's true, complete, open sadness or mixed emotions or whatever, you have to sort of move on from a lot. I can't even say it without, without someone that you. 

Jean: It's a minefield. All right. I, I think what you're trying to say is that there is a, you know, there are characters who behave so horribly that, you know, we can only look at that character and say, this is a psychopath. Certainly this character would do things that I personally would never do.

And yet we come to understand a little bit more about them in this book, how they got the way they did and, you know, there, but for the grace of whatever. Yes. So any of us probably, and, you know, I'm not excusing psychopathology. I'm not excusing horrible, horrible behavior, but I, I kind of get it a little bit more.

Zibby: But at least we have a, we have a peek into the step by step of it or how it makes sense to someone else, which is interesting. Really fascinating. Like, oh, okay. I could see. Yeah, sure. Well, this comes next. Right. Okay. And then you're like, but no, no, no, no, no, no. 

Jean: Interestingly, you know, so far the early response to has been just fantastic.

Uh, I've noticed that the, the very few negative reactions have to do with the main character and how, you know, certain readers just cannot get on board with this character. And, you know, I respect that. I mean, Genghis Khan, probably not a nice guy, you know? But I think many of us really do have a fascination with people who behave this badly.

And, you know, I'm certainly one of them. I love it, a terrible protagonist. I love a morally corrupt protagonist because it relieves me of the necessity of becoming morally corrupt myself. 

Zibby: It also is like, you get to go to that place in your mind where you're thinking like, what if, what is the worst thing I could do, and what would that feel like and look like?

And sometimes you know, we all have to stop ourselves from doing anything bad ever, but that doesn't mean that like occasionally you don't want to do something bad to somebody who deserves it or whatever or for whatever reason. And here you just get to languish in the darkness. 

Jean: Yeah, and I, you know, I think that's why, you know, we love the Ripley novels and we love the Hannibal Lecter novels.

You know, we are not going to fry up somebody's liver with some nice opines in a, in a nice kee, but, you know, human behavior is fascinating. If it weren't, we wouldn't all be, you know, glued to reality TV and Karen videos on YouTube. It, it's very cathartic to watch other people do the things that we would not do.

Zibby: And so how did this just pour out of you? Because it must have, you must have written this quite quickly. 

Jean: Um, not as quickly as the plot, which was, uh, you know, four months as I know we've discussed before this time. Thank goodness. I did not have a raging global pandemic going on and, and me hiding under the covers, but yeah, it, it really, I mean, most of the problems of this book had to do with ironically plot and working it out and making sure that.

It wasn't a letdown. I mean, that was the biggest fear that it would be a letdown after the plot. And, you know, also trying to figure it out myself and I think that's, that's an underrated part of writing the fact that we don't know what's going to happen. And if we do know, it probably reads that way. And, you know, I'm sure you have read books where you could practically visualize the index cards on the wall, you know, chapter four.

This is going to be revealed chapter five. This is going to be revealed. And, you know, I, I'm completely uninterested in, in books like that. And I often end up not finishing them, but when the author themselves doesn't know, and, you know, you sense that they're finding it out as you're finding it out.

That's a really exciting thing. So it's not like I. Require that of myself. That's just how it happened. I mean, there were major, major plot points that I didn't, I didn't know until I was about 20 pages out from them. Yeah. It's. You have to have kind of the writer's version of Nerves of Steel. I mean, I would never cross, walk across a tightrope between the World Trade Center towers myself.

But it feels like, you know, when you begin a massive project like a novel and you don't know what's going to happen, it can feel a little like that. I'm sure you know. 

Zibby: Yes. 

Jean: Now that you're one of us. 

Zibby: Oh, well, thank you. Thank you. Can I read a passage or two?

Jean: Oh, please do. I wonder what you're going to choose.

Zibby: Oh, well, first of all, just the shout out to the tattered cover in here, especially given all of the changes. I was like, anyway, it's from chapter three, More Tales of the City. When she's having this profile written, when Anna is having a profile written about her, she had been readying herself for this, familiarizing herself with the contents of other author profiles, trying to judge what made the profile subjects seem sympathetic, if they did or not, if they did not.

The element of struggle, for one thing, was a clear advantage, but only if the author's new book and its associated success had been a long time in coming, following many published but unread predecessors. If the author was young, or if their work and opportunities seemed to come too easily, humility was the active ingredient.

In all cases, whether it was a miraculous first novel hole vaulting onto the bestseller list or a sudden blinding success after a dozen thwarted attempts, the subject of the New York Times profile must offer up the purest, most self flagellating gratitude. And then just one more line, Anna at 40, give or take, did not fall into the new young author category.

But she didn't fall into the anonymous, mid list author category either. She had found, it seemed, a side door into her imminent literary success, a life wholly outside of literature, and its striving discontents, a marriage of love to a complex and brilliant man, apparently also a tormented man, and the long veil of tragedy that followed them.

From the altar. 

Jean: The long veil of tragedy. That's, by the way, that's the same side door in the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal into UCLA or USC or whatever it was. Same side door. Yeah, it was a lot of fun to write. You know what really amazes me? I cannot understand why more people aren't furious at me.

I think when the plot came out, there was one review that mentioned that the reader was offended by the way I had written about striving new writers. And, uh, you know, when I read that, I thought, I totally understand. You know, where are the rest of you? Why is it just you? I mean, I would be absolutely uh, incandescent with rage.

Somehow people aren't. And I, I wonder if nobody actually sees themselves as an aspiring writer. It's a fascinating thing. I've got to get to the bottom of this at some point. 

Zibby: Well, to say you're offended, doesn't that put you automatically in a category you don't want to be in? Like if you see yourself in that, like why would anyone admit to that?

Jean: Yeah. Yeah. In a way. Yeah, that's true. I mean, I have a lot of respect for that, that person who, who wrote how offended she was. I, I get it. I really do. 

Zibby: I mean, do you like offending people? Do you want to? 

Jean: No, God, no. I'm an ethical culture graduate. I mean, I, I live to. I live to repair the world. That's what I hear about.

But you know, I, I think if I were only making fun of like people on one side of any given divide, that would be inexcusable, but I've, I've always enjoyed making fun of people on all sides. I mean, in the late comer, there was, uh, you know, some fun at the expense of right wing media people. But there was also a send up of progressive education, you know, because there's ridiculous on both sides of the, on both ends of the spectrum.

And we're all, thanks to, you know, recent events in politics, there's nobody in the middle. We are all, you know, divided now, and we're absurd in both places. So, you know, I'm, I'm, uh, I'm even handed with my merrymaking, I guess. 

Zibby: Well, it's satire, really. I mean, it's like there's a yellow faceness to it, in a way, right?

The insider expose of it all. 

Jean: Yeah, oh, but, and by the way, I've heard from a bunch of people who basically accused me of ripping off the yellow face. Hello, can we check the, uh, can we check the dates of publication, please? Having spent several years defending the fact that so many of us Are drawing on the same material to write our novels.

I cannot go back now and say, yeah, that was a little close for Comfort . 

Zibby: But you know, both successful, great books, I mean an industry that is closed to most when you open up those doors, it. There's, there's like endless fascination just waiting, you know. 

Jean: And I do think it's funny that an important plot point in the sequel rests on the long time that it takes to turn around an unsolicited manuscript sent to an agent's office.

And if anybody listening to this thinks that it is unheard of for a manuscript to be returned to its author. Many years later, I would be happy to provide actual examples from the world of publishing. You know, it's better now because a lot of, uh, most submissions are electronic, but certainly in the days I worked in publishing many moons ago, you know, there would be rooms full of manuscripts and you would just never get to them because you were reading agented manuscripts all day.

Zibby: So if you had to give sort of a takeaway about the industry at large that you delve into so much in the book, what, what are some of those? takeaways. It's flawed, but lovable, or, you know, what is it? 

Jean: That's a really good question. And, uh, it makes me think of an interview that I did when I was getting ready to write my novel admission, which is about, uh, Ivy league admissions.

And I was, I was sitting down with the Dean of admissions at Middlebury who'd been all over the place. 

Zibby: I was just there. 

Jean: You were just in Middlebury. 

Zibby: Yes. 

Jean: Okay. Let's put a pin on that. He's not there anymore, but he, he had been at Harvard. He'd been all over the place and he was a kind of a lifetime admissions.

And I said, you know, you've been in this industry for your whole career. What is the personality of somebody who chooses to become an admissions officer? And he said, we're all such do gooders. And I was shocked. I mean, I, I was literally writing this down or maybe I was typing it on my laptop and I remember reading what I had typed and thinking, what?

I mean, that, that was such a, I was so surprised to hear that and it completely changed the direction of the book that I was writing. And I think the same is true of publishing. I mean, I think people go into publishing because they love books. Um, but also because they want to find that book. They want to find that author.

And that book and that author might well be in the slush pile. And the joy of finding that, you know, would be not only a great career coup, but also a personal satisfaction. So I think that, that publishing is incredibly full of incredibly well meaning people who are human and they just don't have enough hours in the day to get to every single manuscript.

But. I mean, I, I, I, I, you may or may not be aware of this, but the novel Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson's first novel, which is a plot point in, uh, both the sequel and the plot, came from the slush pile. I mean, somebody found that novel in the slush pile at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. And, you know, I can tell you, she was on the 100 best books of, uh, since 2000.

So, I mean, there are great things out there. And, you know, a young person entering publishing today knows they're never going to make it. Enough money to live on in New York city. They're going to watch their friends do better and be more secure and have better health insurance and be able to have that third child and, you know, all the other stuff that, that money means, but they're still going into publishing because they love books and they love authors.

So let's give them credit for that. I don't think there's. Any kind of a cabal in publishing, trying to keep people out. I think on the other hand, uh, to the contrary, publishing is one of the few industries where you can enter as an older person, look at Bonnie Garmas. And one of my favorite examples is a woman that probably not many of your listeners will remember named Helen Hoove and Sandmeyer, who back in the.

70s, I believe, published her first novel. It was a doorstopper. It was like a thousand pages long. It was about a hundred years in the life of a Midwestern town. And I think she was living in a nursing home at the time. So, you know, let's give publishing credit for the fact that, you know, it does not close its doors to old people, to people from all backgrounds and, you You know, dedicated, well meaning human beings.

Zibby: Agreed. Jean, thank you so much for talking about the sequel, even though we couldn't get into a lot of the things because it would give things away. But thank you so much. I truly loved it. I laughed. I was like chuckling and, you know, also horrified. It was great. Yeah. 

Jean: Well done. Chuckling and horrified. My work here is done.

Very, very happy. 

Zibby: Thank you.