British-American actress, writer, and podcaster Sonya Walger joins Zibby to discuss LION, a stunning autobiographical novel full of drama, love, and tragedy. Together, they explore the blurred line between fiction and reality, with Sonya describing her book as “a work of fiction in which everything happened.” She shares poignant stories of her charismatic, risk-taking father—once a Formula One driver, polo player, and skydiver—and reflects on how he shaped her own parenting, choices, and identity. She talks about memory, family, her marriage, writing as a way to detangle personal truths, and the chaos of losing her home shortly after this book’s release.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Sonya. Thank you so much for coming On Totally Booked With Zibby to talk about your absolutely stunning, beautiful book, Lion. Congrats. 

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

Zibby: Oh my gosh, Sonya, this book was gorgeous. Like truly gorgeous. I, every sentence was beautiful. I feel like you have taken me all over the place. I feel like I spent the summer in your grandparents' apartment trying to figure out what to do with myself. I feel like I was sitting in your dad's place with his girlfriend, like wearing the sparkly gold shirt. Like I just, I feel like I have lived all of these experiences. It was so powerful.

So well done. 

Sonya: Thank you. I'm so thrilled. I have goosebumps. That's just, that's all you hope for. It's just great. 

Zibby: Oh you're a beautiful writer. Okay. Why don't you tell everybody what this is about? And also it's being marketed as auto fiction, so maybe explain what auto fiction is and. What is real, what is not real and all of that.

Sonya: I hate the phrase auto fiction. I think it sounds like a drive-through it just so I'm anti that phrase, but.. 

Zibby: Grab, grab a sandwich and a novel. See what happens. 

Sonya: Seriously. But I'm fine with it. It's a work of fiction in which everything happened. Is my line on this book? So it is a story about my dad, who was a very charismatic, extraordinary guy who lived enough lives for multiple men and was the kind of human you just, you hope you sit next to at dinner, or that maybe you have as a godfather, but not necessarily as your dad. He was a Formula One racing car driver. He was a polo player. He was a serial lover of women. He was a cocaine addict. He went to jail. He took up skydiving. These are just the headlines of the human that my, my father was, and he died spoiler, but he died very suddenly in an accident some years ago and seven years ago. And my kids were very little and they didn't know him. And so I felt very strongly that I needed to write these stories down.

They met him, but not that they would remember. And also because I have the most terrible memory, so I thought, God, if I don't write them down, I really won't remember them. So the desire to write was really born out of that. And then as I started writing, it was very clear to me that it was just needed to be a work of fiction.

It just. I didn't want to write a memoir. I didn't want to write, I didn't think anybody cared about some dude from Argentina and his wildlife. I didn't think anybody cared about me and, I have my, my, my other life as I'm an actress and I just was allergic to the idea of, penny from lost tells all none of these things were gonna hold it subvert any expectations that might come with the word memoir. I just said, it's just gonna be fiction. And then I have huge license to breathe life into these characters, to supplement what feels thin, because as I say, my memory is lamentable. So that became the sort of working template for what the book would be.

Zibby: Interesting. So in scenes then. So did you make up, for instance, you have this beautiful scene where you are with your dad. He's with his new 2-year-old daughter at the time, and it's a very moving scene where she is pushing away his hand as he tries to reach for her. And you are saying, I've spent my whole life wishing that hand would reach out for me.

And I was like, oh my gosh. Talk about goosebumps. So did that not happen? Not to, not, it doesn't matter I guess really. 

Sonya: No, it doesn't matter. But it did happen and it happened over and over, and I think that's what the book is in the same way that a poem is a sort of distillation of moments, I think that's what the book is. That's why. It's one of the many reasons, I call it fiction. It's a crystallizing. And a distilling to down to the essence of things. So when I say it's a work of fiction in which everything happened. I can't it I know I sound highfalutin with that or something, but it, I really can't be more accurate than that.

It really is. Both things are true. 

Zibby: Yeah, no, I understand. It's almost like a historical novel about your own life. 

Sonya: Yes. There you go. 

Zibby: Yeah. So something like that in the book. Yes, it's about your dad, right? But it is so much more about you and your relationship to him, even though you take us back to his relationship with your mom and how their whole life started and I.

Her like deep disappointment and what it's like to get married at such a young age and all of that. But we take it all back to you as the child and the experiences that having a dad like that specifically him leads you to. You have a whole scene with not just a, like a whole section, about a boarding school, classmates' father, and how he.

Was, I don't know, basically in inculcating you into some sort of a cult essentially that you narrowly avoided and you're like, he was filling a need that you did not fill. So tell me about that moment for instance, and how you saw it then and did that differ when you started writing about it?

Were you then able to contextualize or did you know all along? 

Sonya: No it's a great question. I think so much of this book. So much of writing for me. I've I've now written a second book. I'm halfway through my third. So much of writing for me is the process of finding myself out. On the page of actually realizing that this is what I think about something.

Writing is really where I synthesize things and. Integrate them. I think where I take disparate ideas and realize that it's not even conscious. The weaving of a thread, the thread is already there. It's just for me to lay it out on the page. And I think that was what Lion was in lots of ways for me, was less, therapeutic or cathartic or something.

None of which are bad words, but it was less that and more realizing that this was what I actually thought and that these were, and that, I think you are so astute to point out that it isn't actually a book about my dad, although it purports to be that the question that I asked myself and that lion is the answer to was, what does it mean to have been this man's daughter?

In what way has this man informed who I am, how I parent, what I, the choices I make, and I'm still and will be for the rest of my life because I will always be his daughter. I'm still in dialogue with that question, I'm still holding that up to the light. There are still, recent events. I just lost our home and the buyers.

This becomes a whole nother piece where I'm like. Wow. I, how would my dad react to this moment? Would my dad have chosen to live on the very edge of the wilderness in California with a high risk of fire? And here's me writing a whole book about how I chose, have consciously chosen stability, not conformity but carefully holding my family against chaos.

And here I am against everything I wanted thrown into absolute chaos, literally, two weeks before the launch of Lion. It's it's an extraordinary time and it makes me wonder if I have to write another book. 

Zibby: Of course, you have to write another book. Of course I have to write another book.

No, like your fourth other book. But yeah, my fourth other book, I'm so sorry. I know we've discussed this in the past, but I'm so sorry about the loss of your home. By the way, nobody living in the Palisades or Malibu or any of the areas affected, particularly on the west side. I don't know as many people on the east side, but nobody felt like they were living in a risky territory.

Sonya: Yeah. 

Zibby: Like it felt like the most stable place, even though like I thought the biggest risk was earthquakes eventually. And yeah, they're always alerts, but, so I don't feel like that counteracts the narrative you tell yourself personally. Because okay. 

Sonya: Very good.

Zibby: Okay. For all intents and purposes, like Palisades was like 1950s life today, right? 

Sonya: Palisades definitely was. We lived on a hilltop in Malibu. Okay. Oh, in Malibu. Okay. It was a little more, there was more risk assessment involved. But anyway, it still felt very safe to me and no longer does. So there's an interesting, there's just an interesting question of what would my dad have made of this moment. 

Zibby: I'm trying to think, I'm trying to think, knowing him from the book, what his response would be, but but the one time that you really needed him. When your grandmother died, right? He came running and he was stable in that moment, and he was there for you. So I like to think that he would be on the next flight and he would be there and setting you up where you are.

Sonya: He'd be totally there and I thank you. I do, I love that you point that moment out because it really mattered that moment when my grandmother died and I said, for the first time in my life, I need you. And and he was there. It was, it's a lovely moment to single out. I have done several interviews on this and nobody's mentioned that, because people get so fixated on his negligence and which is abundant.

But the rare moment where he could offer that kind of solace, I. Was really lovely. It was a, was momentous. Yeah. 

Zibby: And he even made it almost joyful, this like reunion with your aunts and everything and he brought his sort of Jo de ViiV, if you will. 

Sonya: Yeah, exactly.

Zibby: And a mix. I think one thing that you point out in the book, which was such a sort of wise assessment and can affect can summarize probably so many people who have a parent or two who whose behavior is perhaps not what they wanted, but that adrenaline seeking is completely the opposite of parenting, right?

He always was searching for the next high, whatever it was, and that sense of excitement and you're like, ask any mom that this is like the height of drudgery, right? It's like the bedtimes and the baths and the bottles and the b like the amount of patience required, cannot, if what you're seeking is constant stimulation, like this is not for you.

Sonya: Not for you. It's so true. Exactly. Yeah. No, I remember landing on that sentence and being like, oh yes, that's right. Adrenaline is the opposite of parenting. The absolute opposite. Yeah. 

Zibby: And not to defend your dad, but it seemed like it was, it could have jail, could have been very easily avoided. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Sonya: Yes, it could. It just was, yet another of his all risk assessment and this living life, like the sort of demigod that I think he. Thought he was and that others thought he was, it wasn't just his own delusion. There was collusion in that because he looked like a French movie. He looked like Alan Delon, my dad and or a dark James Dean.

He had these extraordinary cheekbones and he was, really empirically speaking, he was one of the most charismatic people you've ever met. You people just leaned in, dogs and animals would just come and literally eat from his hand. Little kids would come round. Intrigued by him.

He just had that kind of mesmerizing quality that meant, even men were seduced by my dad. It's an interesting thing. I think they were threatened and irritated and combative, but largely even in his lifetime, men that I talked to, my dad's friends. Would talk about with tenderness about him.

There was such an agreement that this man was set apart if in some way and he just kept cashing in on that. And he was not, he was more human than any of us. If there is such a thing as to me, more human than any of us. But he was eminently mortal. 

Zibby: My goodness. Your life and your upbringing ended up being quite isolated at times, and you talk about how you felt despite the fact that you had.

Three sisters and we learn about all these different very interesting stories along the way that you were an only child. And you say in context, in the context of raising your own kids, that you're, you ask your husband like, is this right? Are kids supposed to fight like this? Does this seem normal to you?

And I found that so endearing too, because I always worry, I don't know, are they fighting too much? Is this one I'm supposed to back away? Do any of us even know? I dunno. 

Sonya: Okay, good. Are you an only child? 

Zibby: No, I have a brother, but I still look at my kids and I'm just like, I don't know this seems pretty rough to me, but they say not to interfere, but I'm yelling at them anyways. 

Sonya: It's true. Okay. I'm glad to hear that it's I just assumed that it was the condition of being an only child, that you were just completely unequipped to deal with siblings. But I'm relieved to hear that it happens to the best of us. 

Zibby: How else do you feel that your dad's influence affects your parenting?

Sonya: Like I say, I think, I look at. It's just so inextricable, isn't it? When you're in a marriage? It's, in some ways it's easy to see oh, I do this, and he does that, and in other ways you can't really tell whether you have assumed that role in the absence of the other person.

Your partner providing that, rigidity or sternness or whatever, whether that is, were you on your own? Would you be, would I be more playful, more flexible, more those qualities, but. Such, there's such a symbiosis. It's just so interesting to know what's the vine and what's the the branch, if you like, my husband is, tends to be the playful one, the one that wakes them up to show them a blood moon. He is, he tends to be the one that is, delighting them. Implanting them with interesting things and we, we talk slash bicker about it, where I'm like.

But if I weren't keeping all the trains running and running all the meals and getting everyone to school, I too would, might show them a blood moon. Truthfully. I don't know if I would but I, it's hard to know what, where you are reacting to the partner you are with and where you are bringing your intrinsic self in the way that you were parented.

I was parented by an extremely both overwhelmed and very competent mom. Single mom essentially with this sort of intermittent, a dazzling beam of my dad, but we can't really call that parenting. That was more like a visitation or something. So I inherit from my mom sort of extreme competency.

And which doesn't always allow for the sort of delightful part. And sometimes, I took my daughter to London recently to visit my mom, and it was just us on our own for a week. And I really got a taste of oh, this is, this is delightful, this is so enjoyable. I'm not, because it's just me and her and we are not wrangling the little guy, and I'm not prodding my husband to remind him to do this or that because it was the two of us.

There was an element, there was a blood mood element of ease and of me being much more compliant than I usually am. And that was interesting to me. I was, that was, felt like a revelation that perhaps intuitively I might not have arrived at. 

Zibby: Interesting. Yeah, I get that too.

When it's one kid and you're not at home and nothing he's taken care of and you go out to dinner and you're like, oh, this isn't so hard. What was the big deal? You're like, oh, it's because I'm on vacation. Can I just read a passage or two maybe. 

Sonya: I'd love it. 

Zibby: Okay. This is all just to show how amazing.

Of an author you are, and I wanna talk about how you came into your writing style. My stepmother slips on her dark glasses, my adopted sister dozes in her mother's lap. I pull out my book. I read Uncle Tom's cabin at the top of Machu Picchu. There is a photo of me reading it. I'm wearing a brown poncho and a cowboy hat.

I am sitting cross-legged. I read about escape and the white man's dominion over brown bodies while sitting on the top of a mountain, to which centuries earlier, more brown bodies fled to escape the white man's fist. But I know none of this. I only know how to plunge my pain like a hot blade into the cool depths of the written page.

I know how to submerge and disappear, and every book I ever read has opened its pages to me with the promise that it will hold me. It will never abandon me, it will never let me go. My father returns empty handed. He does not speak to anyone for the rest of the evening in silence we ride down that mountain, slide back to the hotel, to our rooms. He holds silence like a lost fortress, and we wander around his ruin. Oh, so good. 

Sonya: Thank you. 

Zibby: So good. The analogies I was trying to analyze, like. What makes your sentences so deeply powerful? I think it's the many analogies that are like not expected, like holding something like a fortress or having the air feel like corduroy or flannel.

Or you said something about the flannel feeling air, and I'm like, oh, I know what she means when air feels like a flannel shirt. Yes, but you don't think about it like that. So tell me a little bit about like how you became the writer that you are and how you developed this style, which is really poetic.

Sonya: Thank you. I honestly credit just years and years of reading. My mom was a nursery school teacher and so you learn to read pretty young when you're the single child, only child of a nursery school teacher. 'cause she's just read a book and do your thing. So I started at two and a half and I really haven't looked back.

They really have been my company and as I say in that passage, they've been my solace and I, for being an actor, I'm a hopeless actor and I never watch anything ever. My agents are always rolling their eyes 'cause they're like, you've got a meeting with so and and I'm like, I dunno who that is.

And it's, the director of something that everybody's watching. I just never watch anything. But I do read voraciously and I think I have, I've been writing for years, but I have been I hold the bar so high for what I think good literature is. I really do. I, I. I have no other phrase for it.

I just hold the bar really high. And so it's made me terribly intimidated. It had made me very intimidated of writing a book because as I kept saying to my husband, I just can't write a bad book. I just, I'll die if I write a bad book. And I hosted a podcast for a while called Bookish, where I interviewed interesting people about the five books that had shaped the most. And I loved it. I absolutely loved it and I loved the research involved in the whole thing. But as better than anybody, Zibby it's an enormous amount of work and, you need great producer really in order to help make it run.

And, but it didn't matter. I kept doing it, but I had this moment of insight where I was interviewing Douglas Stewart actually, who wrote Shuggy Bae in a book I loved. And I was listening to Douglas and he was talking about his five books, and he was talking so sensitively and with such intelligence, and I just had this moment of being like, I don't want to interview another author.

I want to be one. I just, it was such an interesting revelation and it just hit like a bell and then covid happened and we all retreated to our houses in our rooms and drove ourselves mad trying to keep children in chairs during Zoom school and all of that. And so my retreat in the afternoons when I finally, caved and let the kids watch a movie or something, I'd go to my little shed and I think we all just lived on the membrane of our own mortality in that time. And this very, again, clear bell like story for me of, I will, if I die and I haven't written a book, this is not okay. If I don't make another TV show, I am fine. But if I haven't written a book that feels incomplete to me, that my life feels, I hate to say that word as being a mom with children, but I have to say I felt incomplete and so sorry, this is a long answer to your question, but I think all of these things informed, sitting down to write and I love poetry and my favorite is the poetry of Mary Oliver who just is clear as a bell and so much distilled into this deceptively simple musical lyricism. But it feels like a conversation.

It just feels like she's talking to you and I wanted that, she's in there, but then so many others are in there. I was really interested in these people who were writing about their lives in a way that still carried some magic to it that wasn't.

Linear. That wasn't, he was born in 52 and he died and none of that's interesting. I'm not very good with facts. My husband will agree with this harshly, I'm, I don't hold them. I'm not interested in them. I hate instruction manuals. I throw them out. I, I like distilled things. I like things that have come to their essence.

And then finding a way to lay that down on the page. 

Zibby: I love that. So are you like whiskey on the rocks? 

Sonya: No, I'm the gro girl. 

Zibby: The gro, okay. Alright. Oh my gosh. So funny. When you sat down to write and it says in the book you talk about talking to your mom and interviewing her during Covid and getting her stories down and all of that as well.

How long, like, how long does the sentence take you, do you know what I mean? I am not a literary writer at all. I could write like an entire page in two seconds because it's not, I don't take my time and like I think you. It looks like every sentence has been like painted with a watercolor brush or something like, so deliberate.

Sonya: It's interesting. Thank you. Lime was a mixture. It, it's also harvested from journals. I. Long, long-term journal keeper, and so I went through and highlighted sentences that I liked. They were less like, oh, I like that turn of phrase. It was more like, oh, I'd forgotten that moment.

I'd forgotten what happened. So the journals, the highlight journals became the sort of starting point, and then I transcribed moments into my laptop and then started. I've used this phrase before, but it's because it works. I started working the clay. It felt like I had a little bit of cold clay in my hands, and if I just stayed with it and needed it, I would get a story out of it.

I would get a moment out of it. I could breed that into a paragraph or maybe even a whole section. I kept telling myself, you have everything you need. You have everything you need. You don't go reaching for extra. You have it just work what you have. It's a helpful mantra in my life. I find it stops me, impulse buying on Amazon.

You but it also is, it was, it's a helpful mantra as a writer. I think when the impulse to go and reach for the outlandish and jump the shark with something it's actually great to just keep coming back to. To this sense of you, you have what you need. You can just keep working what you have and if you feel you haven't, you probably haven't worked what you have.

That said, Lion did come together quite quickly. I, now I can say that. Comparative to my third book, which is really hard. I didn't, my struggle was what to make of all these stories in the past. And I wasn't, because I knew, as I say, I knew I didn't want memoir and so I would just journal in between being like, I'm stuck and I dunno what to do and it's Jake's birthday and I, the cake I got, the cake is all wrong.

And then I started realizing that actually what I needed to thread these stories together was to include the present and then the realization that actually what I needed to do was. Set the whole book in the present. So to begin each paragraph with, I am 18, I am 45, I am two, I am, I'm two and three.

That continuous present became an extremely, as soon as I had that, then the book came together really quite quickly after that. But yes I'm glad if the sentence sentences feel deliberate and intentional then that's. That's then mission accomplished. That's good. 

Zibby: Yes. You're officially a potter, so that's great.

Sonya: Great. 

Zibby: Sonia, congratulations. So beautiful. I could talk to you all day about, and I'm excited you're gonna be a featured guest at our retreat coming up because so much more to hear from you and your career. And I didn't even get to the fact that you were an actor, which I didn't know as I mentioned.

So sorry. 

Sonya: But please, that's not what we're here for. I'm delighted not to talk. 

Zibby: Okay. I will see you soon and thank you so much. I really love. 

Sonya: Thank you for having me. 

Zibby: Really beautiful. Really beautiful. Okay, bye-bye.