In this mini-podcast, Vendela Vida explains why Joan Didion is a formative literary hero, and why long-form interviews are great. Phew.

Part three to follow.

Part 2 of Vendela Vida's Writing Life podcast begins with a discussion of performance: parenthood as performance, self as performance, acting as performance. ----more----From here we sashay to:

Part 3 to follow.

Vendela Vida is a novelist, editor (of The Believer magazine), screenwriter, literacy advocate (via 826 Valencia). She is also a wife, of the similarly busy writer Dave Eggers, and mother. ----more----Given all these roles, it seems miraculous that she has written one book much less six, including the novels And Now You Can Go, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and The Lovers.

We met to discuss her newest book, The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty. Set in Casablanca, we follow a young woman on the run from herself. This figurative sense of escape is made real when her backpack is stolen from a hotel lobby, including all the documents that establish her identity. Her subsequent adventures include absurd exchanges with the local place, even more absurd conversations on a film-set, where, almost inevitably, she plays a stand-in for someone else.

Funny, parenthetical, and quietly moving, The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty is also autobiographical, Vida revealed in this first episode. At a loss where to start I began by asking about the title, a quote from Rumi. We moved onwards to:

Part 2 to follow.

As a trailer for the next subject on This Writing Life, Vendela Vida reads from her latest novel, The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty - just released in paperback via Atlantic Books in the United Kingdom.

In the final part of David Gates' episode of Writing Life, we begin by exploring the question of religion that we failed to address in Part 4. 'I am not a religious person. I am to some degreee obsessed with it.'

----more---- From there we move to:

As a trailer for the next subject on This Writing Life, Vendela Vida reads from her latest novel, The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty - just released in paperback via Atlantic Books in the United Kingdom.

In the fourth and penultimate part of our podcast with David Gates, we set out by talking about money - how to earn it, keep writing, earn money from writing.

----more----Gates recalls his 29 years at Newsweek before shifting to:

The fifth and final part to follow.

Part 3 of David Gates' conversation with This Writing Life starts with a discussion of 'story' - how Gates writes them and how people tell them (and how Gates writes about people telling them).

----more----

•  is Gates as self-destructive as his characters?

Part 4 (of 5) to follow.

In the (summer delayed) second part of our chat with David Gates, we go on (we can't go) with the influence of Samuel Beckett and Jane Austen.

----more----

• 'What I learned from Austen is that every character in a work thinks he or she is the protagonist'

Part three will be up in less than three months.

David Gates is a novelist, musician, journalist and teacher. His debut, Jernigan (1991), was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and was shortlisted for the National Book Award. ----more----Another novel, Preston Falls, followed, along with two story collections. We met in London to discuss the second of these, A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me, and also return to Jernigan, both of which have been published in the United Kingdom by Serpent's Tail. We met at their London offices, beneath a slightly noisy fan, which I have tried to limit in the recording.

We began by talking about Rhinebeck, the small town in Upstate New York that is the setting for 'Banishment', which opens the new book. 

From there, we moved to: