#1 New York Times bestselling author Leigh Bardugo chats with Zibby about THE FAMILIAR, a spellbinding, lush, richly imagined novel set in the Spanish Golden Age that follows Lucia, a servant with miraculous abilities who becomes entangled in the political and religious turmoil of King Philip II’s court. Leigh discusses how this story, inspired by her own Sephardic Jewish heritage, weaves themes of ambition, identity, and survival. She also talks about her journey as a writer, from finding solace in science fiction as a child to overcoming personal and professional hurdles to pen her debut novel.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Leigh. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss the familiar and your whole career and everything else.

Welcome. 

Leigh: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. 

Zibby: Of course. Okay. Let's just start with the familiar because that's It's still fresh on my mind, having delved deep into, you pronounce it Lucia or Lucia? 

Leigh: Lucia. It's the Spanish as opposed to the Italian. 

Zibby: Okay. All right. I mean, I don't speak either of those languages.

Leigh: Me neither. Well, my Spanish is getting better. It's definitely getting better. 

Zibby: Yeah. Tell listeners a little more about The Familiar if they haven't read it yet, and I know part of it was inspired by your own family history, fleeing the Inquisition and 1400s and all that. So anyway, give us the whole background and everything.

Leigh: Okay. Well, The Familiar is, I would say, historical fiction with just a little splash of the magical or miraculous. It is set in the Spanish Golden Age, which was a time of tremendous political upheaval. And it's about a young woman named Lucia Cotado, who is a servant in an impoverished noblewoman's house.

And she does not have much going for her. Her life is very hard. It is basically toil from sunup to sundown. But she does have this gift, this ability to do small miracles, milagritos. And this gains the attention of some very powerful men in King Philip II's court. Philip is reeling from the loss of the Armada.

He is desperate for a holy champion to save the Catholic world and fight Elizabeth I, the Protestant Queen of England. And Lucia is just desperate for a better life. But this is the time of the Inquisition. And so in order to earn it, she's going to have to use every bit of wit and will to hide her ancestry.

And she's also going to have to earn the trust of the very notorious Giyan Santan Hill, who is a man with gifts and secrets of his own that could doom them both. The story really grew out of My own history, one side of my family is from Morocco and Spain. They fled in 1492, 1492 was, you know, we all know, you know, sail the ocean was big year for Spain, but it was also the year that they expelled their Jewish population.

They said, you can either convert. You can die if you prefer to choose death, or you can go into exile, and, um, most of the Jews did choose to flee, but a number of them stayed and became converts, and Lucia is descended from those converts, and for me, it was this way of kind of filling in the blanks on my own family tree, because we know that some of my relatives did choose to remain in Spain. 

Zibby: And convert and then other people came here. 

Leigh: Yes. Yes. 

Zibby: Got it. 

Leigh: This became a real problem I can get deep in the history if you want, but the Inquisition is born out of this moment Um Inquisition, which I didn't understand when I started researching this book lasted 300 years over 300 years. The last person was put to death by the Inquisition in the mid 1800s to give you an idea of how long this went on.

And it was so brutal that even, there were Inquisitions in multiple countries in every Catholic country, but the Pope even stepped in at one point to say, look, we really want people to convert, right? Like let's maybe not torture them and put them to death. And Philip's response to this was, you know, I have a massive army.

So maybe just lay off and the Pope did, uh, and the, the Spanish tribunal, which was originally led by Torquemada, who was himself descended from conversos became kind of legendary. Now, I think it's worth saying if you have any Spanish listeners that, you know, there is what's called the black legend where Spain is sort of portrayed as the worst and most brutal of countries when the truth is, you know, Every country was pretty brutal.

And one thing Spain wasn't doing was burning a lot of witches. They tended to think that, but that was just a sign of mental illness as opposed to, uh, actual corruption by the devil. And certainly in, in England, they were treating Catholics just as brutally as Spain was treating Protestants and Jews and Muslims in Spain.

Zibby: Wow. Well, it's quite the history. I mean, you should read, um, I know we were talking about on Being Jewish Now, but there's an essay from Joanna Rakoff, which takes place in Spain when she tries to find this hidden synagogue, um, and talks all about the history of Spain and everything. Anyway, maybe we Check it out.

I was sure you were gonna say that you started this book because like one time you burned bread that you were baking and you were like, wouldn't it be great if I could just like.. 

Leigh: My sourdough starter. 

Zibby: I was like, that's where this is gonna come from. She really wanted to fix it. And then like she had a rip in her dress and she wanted to fix that.

Leigh: Much better story. That's much better. That's a much better origin story. 

Zibby: Okay, so we talked at first, you went, we both went to Yale at the same time and I didn't meet you there, but maybe, I mean, who knows, whatever. We can talk about that another time. Did your, when did your love of writing start? Were you involved in writing stuff there?

Like when did this all, and how did you get to where you are now, basically? Tell me the whole story. 

Leigh: Oh, okay. 

Chapter one. 

Zibby: Yes. 

Leigh: Um, I wanted, I loved writing from the time I was a little kid. I was an only child and I spent. All of my time kind of talking to myself and making up stories. I think the turn for me was actually in junior high school.

My mom remarried. We moved to a completely different part of town could not have been more different. We had been living in an apartment my whole life. Now we were living in a house and I started at this new school. And I really felt like I had, like, I had no idea what language they were speaking. Like, it felt like I had crash landed on an alien planet.

And I walked into my school library and there was some kind librarian had put out a table of books that said, discover new worlds. And it was all science fiction and fantasy, which I had never really read before. And, um, That was what I needed. I needed to know that there was something more than home and school and the mall because I was not thriving.

I was a nerdy, weird, awkward kid. And that was when I started reading science fiction and fantasy. And also when I started writing it, it became almost like a survival mechanism and like where I was writing compulsively. I would ditch class to write. Like that's how big a nerd I was. And.. 

Zibby: I don't consider that nerdy.

I think that's awesome. But okay. Keep going. 

Leigh: Thank you. Thank you. And. I think, you know, I always wanted to be a writer. I always wanted to be a novelist, but I had no idea how to go about it. So, you know, my, my history looks good on paper, right? I, I won some contests. I went to Yale. I majored in English. And then there's this gap of about 10 years where I flounder around.

I have a lot of different jobs. None of them good. Well, one of them was good. I got to write movie trailers for a living, but where I would try to write books and I would. Get about 25, 000 words in and then I would just stop because I had no idea how to outline. I didn't understand story structure, but I was living in Los Angeles and in Los Angeles.

If you don't take a street screenwriting course, they take you out and shoot you. So my screenwriting class and. I learned how to structure a story and even then I think, you know, I had a lot of doubts by that point. I was in my 30s and I was in the grips of a pretty intense depression. I was married to a real schmuck and I was very lost.

And so when I got the idea for Shadow and Bone, my first novel, I did not sit down and start writing. I thought, why bother? It's just going to be one more thing that you start and don't finish. And then I had a conversation with a friend where she was like, you should apply to the MFA. You should do this, do that.

And I said, you know what? I'm, I'm going to go outline this book. And I'm going to try to write it before I turn 35. And as it turned out, it took me till almost 36, but I did finish that first book. And I told myself it didn't have to be good. It just had to be done. But there was nothing in it that was good that I went back and I revised it.

And That was the first book I sold that was Shadow and Bone and it changed my life. 

Zibby: So you just got an agent, sold it right away and then 

Leigh: I queried, I got my first rejection two hours after I sent out my first email. 

Zibby: Wow. 

Leigh: Which was a blow. I will not lie. And I remember getting on the 101 freeway and driving in.

Well, this is either going to be the whole story or it's going to be a footnote of the story that I get to talk about in interviews. So thank you. Thankfully, Joanna Volpe plucked me out of obscurity. She said my query wasn't very good, but the pages were. And. Yeah, I, it was a very good time to be selling a young adult fantasy story, and the kind of fantasy I was writing wasn't particularly popular, but it became popular, and I was lucky to land with a publisher, Macmillan, that really pushed my books aggressively, and that then led to Um, The Six of Crows duology, which was set in the same world, and that really was the sort of big moment in my career, and that continues to probably be my most popular book.

And then I moved into Adult, a ninth house, which is set at Yale, uh, among the secret societies. But I think in some ways the familiar was the book I would have written when I was a It's, you know, 20 or 30 if I'd had the chops. 

Zibby: Hmm. Wow. 

Leigh: Books are hard. 

Zibby: Books are hard. I know. I'm like, should I take a screenwriting class?

That was what I got out of that whole story of your life was like, maybe I should have taken the screenwriting class. 

Leigh: Um, we can talk about the screenwriting class and how it turned out to be a little bit of a scam that I fell for. Oh, 

Zibby: no. Yeah. 

Leigh: But I learned to outline, so I call it a victory. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh, that's so funny.

So do you still live in LA or do you live in New York? 

Leigh: I do. No, I live in LA. We actually, I bought my first house, um, a few years ago during the pandemic and we just got the roof done. Very exciting stuff. I am learning the joys and terrors of home ownership, but yeah, we live in a much quieter part of town than where I grew up, where there are bears and coyotes and so forth.

Yeah. 

Zibby: Interesting. Well, at some point you have to come to my bookstore in Santa Monica. You have to come to an event. Do you want to? 

Leigh: Sure. You're basically in another country because you're in Santa Monica and I'm East, but yeah. 

Zibby: Oh, you're East. Okay. I was like, where even are there bears nearby? Well, anyway, if you ever decide to take a, a big trip, well, we can talk about it later, but we would love to have you.

Anytime. 

Leigh: And I love that you opened a bookstore. Like that just, that's so cool. It makes me so happy. We need them. 

Zibby: It makes me happy too. I love it. It's like my happiest place, just to go in there and like sit on the couch and listen to all the conversations. 

Leigh: Oh. 

Zibby: Yeah. 

Leigh: Good. That's good people, people listening and people watching.

Zibby: Yes. Always impressive to hear what people are saying. People are reading and, I don't know, all their opinions. In The Familiar, though, you talk a lot about not only, like, class differences, right? So, so Lucia sort of sleeps literally in the dirt and has, like, no prospects and is basically feeling completely trapped with, like, an evil boss, which I'm sure many people can relate to in their own lives.

Maybe, maybe not the dirt, but, you know, that feeling of, like, this is It's where I am and how am I going to change my station in life? How am I going to get out of this job? Like what are my opportunities? Like where, how do I take my next step and all of that? And that feeling, you know, and then she finds this magic, which I feel like, again, people are just looking for in their own lives.

Like we can't always like, you know, make the fire like go up the walls or whatever and like change things and make glasses sort of come together again. But like, I think everybody, I mean, this is like sort of the bigger message of like. Can you find that magic that only you have that can somehow change your current situation?

Leigh: I think You know, I, I don't always know the story I'm telling when I set out to tell it. I know the plot, I know the big moments, I know where I want my character to go. But I don't think I see the larger theme until I take a step back. And Lucia is this young woman. Who has, you know, she's very poor. She has a actually a higher education than most people would have because of her circumstances, but she can't use it at all.

And she has this tremendous ambition, right? She, she wants to use her lively mind. She wants to be seen and understood. She wants to be acknowledged. And instead she lives sort of invisibly in this world. And. the more famous she becomes, the more she is acknowledged, the more she gets what she's hungered for, the more of a target she becomes, too.

And I think that's something that a lot of women understand, particularly at a time when everybody is expected to look publicly. 

Zibby: Mm hmm. 

Leigh: Oh, the more attention you get, the more success you have, the more of a target you are. And I think that that's sort of at the heart of Lucia's story, this driving ambition that's up against one of the most brutal and terrifying forces in history.

And as for the magic, you know, yes, I think we all want to have that spark inside of us. But I think as I've written, you know, the magic has gotten smaller and the world has gotten bigger in, you know, Storytelling, and what I really wanted to play with in this book was, you know, this was a time when magic and miracle were virtually indistinguishable, but the church owns miracles, and magic belongs to the devil, but even the idea of the miraculous is deeply embedded in this period of life, right at that cusp between the medieval period and the renaissance period.

So to me, that was sort of an exciting thing to play with. What's fraud? What's real? What's miracle? What's magic? And how does the church view something like this that derive, and this is also something that derives from her own ancestry, from Latino, and from this language of exile, um, which makes it even more dangerous for her.

So yeah, I think in some ways it's a fairy tale, but it's a fairy tale that I kind of set on its head. 

Zibby: I mean, her first obstacle was another woman, which is also sadly what happens in some, sometimes too. 

Leigh: Yes. But I think it's Yeah. Valentina Like she's on her own journey too, right? Like she, she starts out as the kind of wicked stepmother, the evil employer of the poor downtrodden servant, but she has her own struggles and her own story.

And she kind of took me by surprise in the writing. And I loved writing her in her own kind of hunger and desperation and the shame that goes with this desire for a better life. And yeah, she's, I love somebody, I love when you meet a character, but the character doesn't turn out to be who you think she is.

Zibby: Yeah. Well, she's also feeling very trapped. Everybody's feeling very trapped. 

Leigh: Look, it's interesting you mentioned class, because if you were at the top, like if you were hanging out with Philip and his court, then yes, you were probably, reading and writing. You were talking to philosophers. You were, even as a woman, you had tremendous mobility.

If you were at the very bottom, like Lucia is you, your life is very conscripted. It's very brutal, but you also have a certain amount of freedom because you have to be able to go to the market to go shopping. You have to be able to do chores as if you're a fish mongers wife. You need to sell the fish if you're in the middle.

The way Valentina is. It's a little tougher, like you're, you're, you literally are trapped inside. Women could not leave home without their chaperones. There were actual stories of women leaning out of their windows so far to try to get a glimpse of the world that they would plummet and break limbs or even die.

So that's how constrained your life could be during this time period. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. Well, it's interesting with the book coming out, sort of in the context of what's going on with Judaism at large, anti Semitism. October 7th attacks, like, that feeling of being trapped, not knowing what to say, things aren't fair, all, you know, there's some, some themes as a Jewish author, and you don't have to go here if you don't want to, but how have you found it, like, bringing a book out now?

Leigh: Honestly, it's been, you know, in some ways, writing about my own identity felt like a very safe space given some of the conversations that have happened in publishing over the recent years. It felt like, okay, I get to explore this part of myself. And then the conversation changed entirely and it's been very hard to figure out how to navigate it.

And you know, the last tour I was on was very intense. I was getting threats and we had to have additional security and that happened. inevitably changed the dynamic of how I interacted with readers and how I felt about being out in the world. And in some ways, again, it paralleled Lucia's journey in the same way.

The more present you are, the more visible you are, the greater chance that somebody is going to want to knock you down. So it's a, it's a deep tangle and it's been the subject of a lot of conversations. But one of the great joys of this has been meeting readers of all different backgrounds, all different religions who have come to me and said, you know, I'm Lucia.

This is my story, you know, which is a very powerful thing to hear from somebody, especially when you don't come from the same place. 

Zibby: Interesting. Yeah. It is a confusing time and every day I feel like there's more, you know, things to fight against. But anyway,.. 

Leigh: That's where I try to stay is in a place of compassion and humanity.

And, and I think that's the only thing that's going to get us to the other side of this. 

Zibby: Yes. Agreed. So, this conversation is a special thing for me on this podcast because I am trying something new for the first time in like six and a half years. I am part of a book group at, uh, Temple Emanuel of the Gather.

I have a new gather book club and they are reading, they were reading your book or we were reading your book and I said, well, why don't you come to the podcast and listen in I'm excited. And you said yes, and they said yes. So we have a couple book club members who joined in. They've been in, in the dark in the Zoom squares, uh, while we've been chatting.

And I wanted to give these two ladies an opportunity to ask you questions as well. So if you guys are still there, uh, I will ask you to unmute and if you have questions for Lee to please ask them. 

Club Member #1: Hi, thank you very much. I have a question. Your feelings behind this book were, were very personal from your family.

Are your, other books, do they also have a personal background or are they the same genre of historical fiction with a little bit of fantasy? 

Leigh: They're a little different. You might be in for a surprise if you pick them up. Ninth House was actually where I first, my heroine, heroine is actually half Jewish and, and I don't want to get into the specifics of her other half, but um, she is, she, Ladino comes to the rescue for her.

She has, because my, my. Grandmother spoke Ladino. And so I grew up with these fragments and these um, refranes. And so there's a moment, a very important moment in the story where she calls on that to rescue her from a very dire situation. But those books, Ninth House and Hellbent, and there will be a third, are definitely darker.

They're, there's a little more horror in them. They're set at Yale. So it's a, you know, you can literally go and see every single building and object that's referenced in that book. You can walk the path of that, which is, It's kind of exciting when people post pictures of going, uh, around campus that way.

And then my earlier books are more heavy fantasy, but I would say all of my books have a personal element in them, and they have a strong influence of history. So the Shadow and Bone trilogy was set in a world inspired by Tsarist Russia, and I think you will very clearly see that, see parallels to certain elements of that life and that world that you can read through in them.

Six of Crows, which is set in the same world, was, is set in a country in that world that's more heavily inspired by the Dutch Republic of the 1700s. So for me, writing always begins in research and I want my worlds to feel as real as possible. And so that's where that kind of grounding impulse, I feel like you can't get away with if you aren't actually grounding the world in a real way.

Club Member #1: All right. So the third book you mentioned that is going to be coming, is that part of a trilogy also? 

Leigh: Yes, that's part of the Ninth House trilogy. That's Ninth House Hellbent, and then third book will be coming out, not next year, but the year after that. I'm also working on a series of horror novellas, and then I have a pure historical, and it will not have any magic in it, and it's set in a completely different time period and location, because I like to make life hard on myself.

Uh, and that will be probably several years in the future. The thing I realized is I, when I was first publishing, I was putting out a book a year, um, which is kind of what working in young adult demands. Yeah, your, your readers are aging. So your publisher wants you to be working as fast as possible. And in some ways that's great, right?

That built my career and it taught me a kind of like intense discipline around deadline. That said, when I moved into writing adult and ninth house, and now the familiar, there's so much research that goes into these books that that kind of schedules. Just not possible. And also I'm going to be 50 next year and I'm tired.

Club Member #1: You think you're tired now? Wait, 20 years.

Leigh: Mute that one. 

Club Member #1: Thank you. 

Leigh: Of course, thank you for reading. 

Club Member #2: I have a question too, because I'm part of the book club. Hello. Hi, and your book was my very favorite, because I've read all the books in the book club, and I loved your book, and I even finished it very quickly, because I loved it, and I started reading Ninth House.

Okay. And Alex reminded me very much of, of Lucia. 

Leigh: Oh, interesting. That's because she's so bold and Lucia is so well initially quite shy initially. 

Club Member #2: Yeah. And so my question for you is, might there be sequel to the familiar? 

Leigh: Um, never say never. I wrote it as. a one off, but you know, we're, we have it in development as a television show and the inevitable result of that has been people asking, well, you know, what, what would the next season look like?

And so my writer brain is like, Oh, this could be this, which is, I don't know. I liked the idea of it being complete, like a fairy tale, right? You don't get a sequel to a fairy tale. So, for now, I'm leaving it where it is. And I have all these other books that, you know, if I want to get paid, I have to write them.

So, I'll leave you with that. 

Club Member #2: I have a 15 year old granddaughter and a 16 year old granddaughter. What book should they read? Should I recommend to them to start? 

Club Member #1: Good question. 

Club Member #2: Are they, or are they too young? 

Leigh: No, I think you could easily recommend to them Six of Crows would probably be the place to start with my YA.

If they want to begin at the beginning of the Grishaverse or if they're reluctant readers, I would put them towards Shadow and Bone because it's a simpler, chosen one story, a little bit easier if they're not used to fantasy. But if they're reading in that genre already, I would go to Six of Crows.

Honestly, it was my fourth book, and therefore I think much better than my earlier books. And obviously there's the Netflix show that was based on both Shadow and Bone and Six of Crows that we have two seasons of up on Netflix, if that's a way to get them engaged. But yeah, they're, and if you have very reluctant readers, we have a graphic novel called Demon in the Wood that isn't a bad introduction.

But yeah, I would start there. I would not point, unless they're very mature readers, I would not point them to Ninth House. You've read it. It's, you know, it's, it's quite dark. 

Club Member #2: I think they're both very, very good reader and readers. And one is especially into fantasy. 

Leigh: Then I think Six of Crows is the move.

It's only a two book series. So if they like it, then they can get into the rest of the Grishavers without having anything spoiled. 

Club Member #2: Thank you so much. I'm so happy to meet you. 

Leigh: I'm happy to meet you. And I'm so glad I won book club. That's amazing. 

Club Member #1: What's the name of your Netflix series? 

Leigh: It's called Shadow and Bone.

Club Member #1: Okay. 

Leigh: It's quite different from the books. Well, first season is quite similar, but then the second season diverges quite a bit. But I think they did a very good job, honestly. 

So. 

Club Member #1: Check it out. 

Club Member #2: Great. 

Zibby: Amazing. Leigh, thank you. Thank you, book club ladies. Thank you, Leigh, for being so open. And yeah, this has been wonderful.

Um, I'm so impressed with everything that you're doing and have done and you're writing and everything. So congratulations. 

Leigh: Thank you so much for having me. Um, my husband actually read your book a couple years ago on a plane or maybe last year on a plane and was like, do you know this one? I was like, no, I don't, but now I can say I do.

Zibby: Oh, that's awesome. Well, thank you. Thanks to your husband. That's amazing. 

Leigh: Thank you all, thank you for reading the book and thank you for having me. It was really fun. 

Club Member #1: Thank you. 

Zibby: Bye. Thank you.