Adelle Waldman is the author of two novels: Help Wanted, published in 2024, and The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. which was named one of the year’s best books in 2013 by The New Yorker, The Economist, The New Republic, NPR, Slate, Bookforum, The Guardian and others. In this illuminating conversation that took place shortly after the US election, Adelle talks about the job she took at a big box store before writing a book about the exploitation of low wage workers; the US legislative proposal she recently drafted for a policy thinktank; and her love of expansive, psychological nineteenth century novels, especially those written by Jane Austin.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1977, Adelle attended Brown University in Rhode Island, worked as a reporter in Connecticut and Ohio, and wrote her breakout novel after moving to Brooklyn with her husband. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic. She joined Pamela in the Brooklyn Podcasting Studio.

How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley

Presented by Knockabout Media. 

Original music by Tyler K. Rauman

Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com

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Adelle Waldman is the author of two novels. In this bonus episode, she reads from her latest, Help Wanted. Our full interview will be available on March 25.

More about Help Wanted:

"At a big-box store in a small town in upstate New York, the members of Team Movement clock in every morning at 3:55. Under the eye of a self-absorbed and barely competent boss, they empty the day’s truck of merchandise, stock the shelves, and scatter before customers arrive. When a golden opportunity for a promotion presents itself, the diverse members of Movement―among them a comedy-obsessed oddball who acts half his age, a young woman clinging to her “cool kid” status from high school, a college football hopeful trying to find a new path―band together and set a just-so-crazy-it-might-work plot into motion. A darkly comic workplace caper that explores the aches and uses of solidarity, Help Wanted is a deeply human portrait of people trying, against increasingly long odds, to make a living."

How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley

Presented by Knockabout Media. 

Original music by Tyler K. Rauman

Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Christina Cooke was named a “Writer to Watch” by CBC Books in 2024. Born in Jamaica, she moved to Texas as a girl, then Vancouver, Fredericton, and Iowa before settling in New York. Her fiction and essays can be found in The Caribbean Writer, Prairie Schooner, Apogee, and the Michigan Quarterly Review. Her novel, Broughtupsy, was published in Canada by House of Anansi and an excerpt (of sorts) called “Homecoming” was published in PRISM International, after which it was selected for the 2023 Journey Prize Anthology.

As a queer Black writer and immigrant twice over, Christina explores themes of home and belonging, identity, family and love in her novel and other writings. I caught up with Christina while she accompanied her partner on a residency in Berlin, and where she was working on her own next project. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley

Presented by Knockabout Media. 

Original music by Tyler K. Rauman

Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Joseph O’Neill has written a family history and five novels including This is the Life, The Breezes, Netherland (which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award), The Dog (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize) and most recently, Godwin. He also writes political reviews and essays as well as short stories, several of which have been published in The New Yorker and included as part of his 2018 collection, Good Trouble.

Born in Ireland, Joe moved around as a child, living in Mozambique, Turkey and Iran until his parents settled in the Netherlands. In 1998, he moved to the US after earning his law degree at Cambridge and working as a barrister in the UK. Since 2011, he has been a distinguished visiting professor of Written Arts at Bard College. 

In this conversation, Joe talks about his love of language and sport, his interest in the American bourgeoisie, and how the damaged masculine specimen depicted in his latest novel, Godwin, became such an important political figure. He joined Pamela in the Brooklyn studio shortly after the US election.

How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley

Presented by Knockabout Media. 

Original music by Tyler K. Rauman

Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

About Terrace Story:

Annie, Edward, and their young daughter, Rose, live in a cramped apartment. One night, without warning, they find a beautiful terrace hidden in their closet. It wasn't there before, and it seems to only appear when their friend Stephanie visits. A city dweller's dream come true! But every extra bit of space has a hidden cost, and the terrace sets off a seismic chain of events, forever changing the shape of their tiny home, and the shape of the world.

Terrace Story follows the characters who suffer these repercussions and reverberations: the little family of three, their future now deeply uncertain, and those who orbit their fragile universe. The distance and love between these characters expands limitlessly, across generations. How far can the mind travel when it's looking for something that is gone? Where do we put our loneliness, longing, and desire? What do we do with the emotions that seem to stretch beyond the body, beyond the boundaries of life and death?

How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley

Presented by Knockabout Media. 

Original music by Tyler K. Rauman

Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hilary Leichter’s debut novel Temporary, tells the story of a woman’s adventures in the gig economy, something with which she has years of experience. Now a lecturer at Columbia University, she talks about the precariousness of temp work, the desire for permanence, and how time is an engine that drives fiction. In Terrace Story, her most recent novel, she returns to time in a story of three generations, expanding spaces, a fable, extinction, and the way we so often fear the wrong thing.  

Hilary grew up in New Jersey and settled in New York, where she initially hoped to be an actress. Not until grad school did she realize she preferred creation to interpretation, and began publishing short stories in outlets like  n+1, The New York Times and The New Yorker. In 2020, her novel Temporary was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a finalist for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Prize. Terrace Story, her most recent novel, was named a best book of 2023 by Time Magazine, The New Yorker, and the LA Times. 

Just doors away from the apartment where she lived while writing Terrace Story, Hilary joined Pamela in the Brooklyn Podcasting Studio for this conversation.

Novels on Hilary’s time travel syllabus include:

• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Sparks
• Kindred by Octavia Butler
• They Will Drown in Their Mother’s Tears by Johannes Anyuru
• The Throwback Special by Chris Bachelder

How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley

Presented by Knockabout Media. 

Original music by Tyler K. Rauman

Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

About I Felt the End Before it Came:

"With great candour and disarming self-awareness, Cox takes readers on a journey from his early days as a solicitous door-to-door preacher in Montreal to a stint in New York City, where he’s swept up in a scene of photographers and hustlers blurring the line between art and pornography. The culmination of years spent both processing and avoiding a complicated past, I Felt the End Before It Came reckons with memory and language just as it provides a blueprint to surviving a litany of Armageddons.

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE GRAND PRIX DU LIVRE DE MONTREAL*

A PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BEST BOOK OF 2023

How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley

Presented by Knockabout Media. 

Original music by Tyler K. Rauman

Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com

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Since 2008, Daniel Allen Cox has published four novels and a memoir-in-essays. He was a finalist for the 2023 Grand Prix du livre de Montréal for his memoir, I Felt It Before the End Came: Memoirs of a Queer ex-Jehovah’s Witness, a nominee for a National Magazine Award for his essay “You Can’t Blame Movers for Everything Broken”, and a contributor to both the Best American Essays and Best Canadian Essays anthologies.   

Raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, Daniel describes the religion as a cult for its use of coercive control and shunning, and for denying him the right to live as a queer man. His observations are adeptly woven into Shuck (2008), shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award and the ReLit Award; Krakow Melt (2010), shortlisted for the Lambda and ReLit awards as well as the American Library Association Over the Rainbow List; Basement of Wolves (2012) and Mouthquake (2015). From Montreal to Brooklyn to Krakow and back, Daniel finds his way among artistic and activist communities. In I Felt It Before The End Came, he steps away from fiction to tell his personal story. 

Follow us on Instagram @howiwrotethisthepodcast. Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com

Listen to our conversation now.

How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley

Presented by Knockabout Media. 

Original music by Tyler K. Rauman

Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jennifer Egan reads from her New York Times Bestseller The Candy House.

About The Candy House:

"The Candy House opens with the staggeringly brilliant Bix Bouton, whose company, Mandala, is so successful that he is “one of those tech demi-gods with whom we’re all on a first name basis.” Bix is forty, with four kids, restless, and desperate for a new idea, when he stumbles into a conversation group, mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or “externalizing” memory. Within a decade, Bix’s new technology, “Own Your Unconscious”—which allows you access to every memory you’ve ever had, and to share your memories in exchange for access to the memories of others—has seduced multitudes.

In the world of Egan’s spectacular imagination, there are “counters” who track and exploit desires and there are “eluders,” those who understand the price of taking a bite of the Candy House. Egan introduces these characters in an astonishing array of narrative styles—from omniscient to first person plural to a duet of voices, an epistolary chapter, and a chapter of tweets. Intellectually dazzling, The Candy House is also a moving testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for connection, family, privacy, and love."

How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley

Presented by Knockabout Media. 

Original music by Tyler K. Rauman

Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jennifer Egan is the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist of A Visit from the Goon Squad and the author of six other books as well as many nonfiction articles including a year-long series about homelessness in New York. Her 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction while her latest, The Candy House, was named one of the New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2022 and one of President Obama’s favourite reads that year. 

Growing up in San Francisco, Jenny moved to New York after completing her MA at Cambridge in the UK. She began writing while working several jobs and attending a workshop hosted by the poet Philip Schulz, where participants read their work aloud and she developed the habit she practises to this day. 

In 1996, Jenny was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and in 2012 won the Pulitzer Prize. She served as President of PEN America from 2018-2021. She met me at the Brooklyn studio for this conversation. 

Listen to our conversation now.

How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley

Presented by Knockabout Media. 

Original music by Tyler K. Rauman

Find out more at our website: www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.