Pod Insights The Oprah Podcast Richard Russo: "Bridge of Sighs" | Oprah's Book Club About this episode Oprah’s Book Club: Presented by Starbucks features coffee and conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo in the Emerald City of Seattle, Starbucks’ hometown. His much-heralded classic, Bridge of Sighs, is Oprah’s 117th book club selection. Published in 2007, The New York Times called the novel "richly evocative and beautifully wrought, delivered with deceptive ease." Surrounded by an audience of readers at a cozy Starbucks Café, Oprah talks to Richard about Bridge of Sighs, a story about small-town life, family, secrets and the complexity of marriage. Mostly taking place in the 1950s and 1960s, Richard also explores the contradictions of a time when America was rapidly changing. Oprah and Russo are joined by an audience of readers as they enjoy a Vanilla Sweet Cream Cold Brew and talk through many thought-provoking questions about the book.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Speaker 00 This episode is brought to you by HBO Max. For your awards consideration, HBO Max presents Rooster. Starring Steve Carell, this new comedy series focuses on the complicated relationship between a successful author and his daughter. Don't miss the series IGN called hilarious and brilliant. Rooster is streaming on HBO Max. Watch now.
0:22 Oprah Winfrey? Hi, everybody.
0:30 Oprah Winfrey? This is Richard Russo, everybody. Esteemed Pulitzer Prize author. It's great. Once you win that Pulitzer Prize, it follows you everywhere. Isn't that great?
0:41 Speaker 02 First line of the obituary.
0:44 Oprah Winfrey? All right, are we ready to roll here?
0:47 Oprah Winfrey? Hello, everybody. A warm welcome to you. Thank you for joining me for Oprah's Book Club, presented by Starbucks. It is wonderful to be here in stunningly beautiful Seattle. Seattle, we love you. Starbucks hometown.
1:04 Oprah Winfrey? This is where Starbucks was born, where the very first Starbucks opened in 1971. Your cozy neighborhood Starbucks Cafe is the perfect place to sit down with a good book, good coffee, and good company. For this month's Book Club Pick, Starbucks is pairing it with a vanilla sweet cream cold brew. It's a slow, steeped cold brew coffee, accent it with vanilla, topped with a float of house-made vanilla sweet cream. And my 117th Book Club selection is Bridge of Sighs. Bridge of Sighs by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Richard Russo. Let's welcome Richard Russo.
1:50 Oprah Winfrey? This novel is a layered coming-of-age story about the dreams, oh, the dreams both lost and realized, of three friends from small-town America. The story is full of surprises. Going to try today not to give away too many here. This audience has read the book, all 642 pages. Thank you, Mr. Russo. Tell us why you loved it.
2:15 Speaker 03 I'm Quentin.
2:16 Oprah Winfrey? Okay, Quentin.
2:17 Speaker 03 I love this book because I love the relationship between Sarah and Kayla. And I particularly love how Sarah introduces Kayla to a whole new world, bringing her out of the projects and introducing her through art. I'm an artist myself. I teach underserved students here in the South King County area of Seattle. And so I'm able to relate to that story because that's something that I do in my everyday life.
2:46 Oprah Winfrey? Here, here.
2:47 Speaker 03 I'll also just say that today is the anniversary of the death of Maya Angelou.
2:54 Oprah Winfrey? It is.
2:56 Speaker 03 Who I took creative writing with in 2001 at Wake Forest. And so I also see the parallel where Maya Angelou has provided and given a new world to so many different people all around the world.
3:13 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah, well, thank you for mentioning that. It is her anniversary. Marcy, Marcy.
3:19 Speaker 04 Hi, I'm Marcy. Thank you so much for having us here today. One of the things that really resonated with me was a scene with Mr. Berg's honors English class. I just love the way that he was able to get the students to think in a non-conformist way and how he influenced the trajectory of their lives from then until the end of the book. The part that resonated the most for me was when he said that you have the majority of your learning in ages two to three, and everything after that is just looking for confirmation of things you already believe. Very insightful.
3:58 Oprah Winfrey? Very insightful. Well, I've loved your work since Empire Falls. And even though Bridge of Sighs was published in 2007, I only recently discovered it for the first time. And I have to tell you, I was brought into the story, of course, by Lucy. But also, I grew up working in my father's store, which was the E and W Market in Nashville, with a barber shop connected to the store. And my father's store reminded me so much of Ike's. And so I'm curious as to how you came to this name? What does the title symbolize in the context of the story? The Bridge of Sighs.
4:42 Speaker 02 Well, I think a lot of the characters in this book are, Lucy certainly, but not only Lucy, are at a point in their lives where, I wouldn't say they're exactly despairing, but they're stressed, certainly. And they're thinking about where their lives are at the moment. And I think that just how high the stakes are for almost all of the characters in this book, led me in a way to The Bridge of Sighs, because as some of you may know, of course Venice is a city of bridges.
5:16 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah.
5:17 Speaker 02 Pontes, as they call them.
5:18 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah.
5:19 Speaker 02 But the story of the actual Bridge of Sighs is one in which the courts were held on one side of the river and the dungeons, the prison,
5:32 Oprah Winfrey? Was on the other side.
5:33 Speaker 02 Was on the other side.
5:34 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah.
5:35 Speaker 02 And it's called The Bridge of Sighs because if you were convicted in the court, you would have to cross the Bridge of Sighs. And the legend has it that of course you would sigh crossing that bridge because once you'd crossed it into,
5:50 Oprah Winfrey? It's over.
5:51 Speaker 02 Into the prison, you weren't coming out.
5:53 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah, it's pretty much over.
5:55 Speaker 02 You wouldn't necessarily be executed, but you would spend the rest of your life there.
5:59 Oprah Winfrey? In the dungeon.
6:00 Speaker 02 In the dungeon. And that's, I think that's, and that and the fact that Venice is one of my wife's and my favorite cities. And we visited there a lot. And so I was probably just looking for an excuse.
6:12 Oprah Winfrey? To call and to use it? But do you think, obviously, you would know, but was it meant to reflect the emotional and, you know, psychological journeys of the characters in any way?
6:25 Speaker 02 Probably.
6:26 Oprah Winfrey? Yes?
6:27 Speaker 02 I said, well, I wouldn't want you to think that authors know what they're doing when they, when they write these books. Most of my books take me about, anywhere from three to four and a half years to write. This was the four and a half year one.
6:41 Oprah Winfrey? Uh huh.
6:42 Speaker 02 And during that time,
6:46 Speaker 02 We're basically feeling our way along, trying to figure out what's going on with these characters.
6:53 Oprah Winfrey? Which is always so fascinating to me. Doesn't that fascinate you? Because when I sit down to write something, I generally know what I'm gonna write.
7:02 Speaker 02 Yeah.
7:03 Oprah Winfrey? I know why I'm gonna write it, because I, you know, I write my own speeches. It's never like, I'm just waiting to find what the speech is gonna tell me it wants to do. So what's your writing process?
7:18 Speaker 02 That's the illusion that a writer, if you spend four, four and a half years on a book, the last final illusion is to convince your readers that you knew what you were doing from the beginning.
7:31 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah.
7:32 Speaker 02 You can buy that if you want, but I don't recommend it, because that's just not the way it works.
7:37 Oprah Winfrey? So you've been called the patron saint of small-town fiction. I would agree with that. Do you think that this small town of Thomaston is a reflection of American life? Or is it a reflection of the life that you grew up with?
7:53 Speaker 02 In Glover'sville, yes. Yes to both of those. I love small towns, Oprah, because they offer something that I think is so important. If you live, if you live in a big city, chances are that you live in a neighborhood full of people like you. I remember when my daughter Emily moved to New York, and she was working with a literary agency at the time, but she was living in Brooklyn, and she could tell, by looking at the other people on her subway car, she could tell where they were going to get off. Because most of those people looked like her, they probably had, they were probably the same age, they had the same amount of education.
8:33 Speaker 02 All of those things became identifiable, as to where they were going to get off in Brooklyn. The thing that's wonderful about small towns, especially if you're interested in class, as I am, the interesting thing about small towns is that the richest and most powerful people in the town have to cross paths with the poorest, and the most disenfranchised, and the most in danger. They simply cannot escape each other. And so you have the Mrs. Whiting's of the world from Empire Falls, who are taking, who are breathing the same air as, like that poor boy John Voss, who ends up shooting people.
9:13 Oprah Winfrey? Yes.
9:14 Speaker 02 And... That's why I think cities, I mean, an awful lot of fiction, an awful lot of American fiction, not just American fiction, gets written about cities because that's where a lot of things happen. But my god, small towns are just gold mines if you really want to understand America.
9:31 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah, I choose a lot of books that are based in small towns because you really get to understand the essence of who people are.
9:38 Speaker 02 Yeah.
9:39 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah, and everybody knows everybody's business and everybody's connected.
9:42 Speaker 02 Yeah.
9:42 Oprah Winfrey? Well, I think one of the reasons why this story is so relatable is because you write about that struggle that so many people have in staying in their hometown or leaving their hometown. Anybody here grew up in a small town? Yeah. Okay, okay, here's a great line from page three about Lucy and Sarah's choice to stay. You say, "Some people, upon learning how we've lived our lives, are unable to conceal their chagrin on our behalf, that our lives should be so limited, as if experience, so geographically circumscribed, could be neither rich nor satisfying. When I assure them that it's been both, their smiles suggest we've been blessed with self-deception
10:24 Oprah Winfrey? by way of compensation for all we've missed." I think that's so interesting, and it brings us to your question. James?
10:33 Speaker 05 Yeah, I grew up in a small town of 3,000 people in Canada. The type of town that assumes your identity even before you know that. I didn't come out until my 30s, yet I think people knew long before I did. It's the town that raised me. My mother still lives there. It's a part of me, but there's this theme of self-exposure that we have no control over, intentional concealment, this hiding in plain sight. And also this tension between origin and becoming. And so, the question I have for you is, what does it take to leave the town that raised you?
11:17 Speaker 05 And when we come back, do we ever get to be the true version of the person we became?
11:24 Speaker 02 Good question.
11:25 Oprah Winfrey? Whoa, James.
11:25 Speaker 02 Good.
11:31 Speaker 02 Thanks.
11:36 Speaker 02 Well, I would begin by saying that that's what I did. I mean, I left my small mill town in upstate New York. At my mother's insistence, really, she had a she had a plan for me and we followed basically the diagram for for her plan. And for a while, it kind of worked. We left upstate New York for Tucson, Arizona, and and I found a new life there. I think that one of the things that surprised my mother, who tried and fought so hard for us to, as she put it, escape this this place. One of the things that surprised her the the most was that I would find my way back there.
12:21 Speaker 02 I mean, I've never I've never lived in in Glover'sville since since leaving that place. I go back and I visit. I still have family there. There are still people that I love there. But but I've never lived there. But I would also say, if this kind of answers your question, is that if you read my novels, I think it would be almost as fair to say that I never left.
12:48 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah.
12:48 Speaker 02 So I live my imaginative life among people that I didn't know I loved until I was I mean, all that time I spent in Arizona, I did I did a BA in English, an MA in in English, a PhD in English, always with the idea that I would become a professor.
13:15 Speaker 02 And had no no idea at all that I would ever want and need as desperately to live my life imaginatively in various versions of Glover'sville, New York. Never occurred to me. So can you go back? Absolutely, you can go back.
13:32 Oprah Winfrey? And be fully yourself. And be fully yourself.
13:34 Speaker 02 And and and having discovered what you didn't know before, which was who the hell you are, right?
13:42 Speaker 05 It's really this notion of being a traveler, like some of the characters, taking a step off the path and and and making a life elsewhere. But as a traveler, we can always come home.
13:53 Speaker 02 And that's what happens to Noonan. In this, in this book, he becomes a traveler. He's the one who lives in, in Venice. And thinks until pretty close to the end of the book, that he knows who he is. Um, and he, he, he carries his rage, his animosity, his uh, into, into his paintings. But it's only when he, it's, it's, it's only when he, when he changes, that he's able to come back home as the person he was destined to be. As a, as opposed to the person he was trying to protect, who was so full of rage, if that makes any sense.
14:30 Oprah Winfrey? For me, this book raises the question, I don't know about you guys, you think about this. What's more important, ambition or contentment? And the question is, was Lucy content? Being in, in, in, in that community and never leaving?
14:46 Speaker 02 I love Lucy Lynch. Um, and what I love about him, Oprah, is exactly what you're, what you're saying. He's, um, he's, he's an optimist for one thing, and I, I try to be-
15:00 Oprah Winfrey? He's an optimist with limited ambition.
15:01 Speaker 02 Yes, and-
15:03 Oprah Winfrey? It's true.
15:04 Speaker 02 That's absolutely true. Um, and he has found contentment, um, in, um, in his life. And it's, I have to say something that I, that I envy in him.
15:17 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah.
15:17 Speaker 02 Um, it's, it's, I mean, he's, he's married to this wonderful woman.
15:23 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah.
15:23 Speaker 02 Sarah. He adored his father. Um, he's, it seems to me that he's living the life that he was, that he was destined to live. Very different from, very different from Newman.
15:36 Oprah Winfrey? Very, very different from Newman, Bobby McCartney. Is it admirable, or naive, or just a coping mechanism, his optimism?
15:44 Speaker 02 Yes.
15:49 Speaker 02 All these. What did you think? What do you think, James? Was it admirable, naive, or just a coping mechanism?
15:55 Speaker 05 Well, I know people like Lucy who have not left. And there is an optimism. And I don't think it is naive. I think it is a choice. Our world doesn't have to extend beyond the borders of the town. This town I grew up with has a start and a finish. You know when you're in town and you know when you're out of town. And you know everybody that's from there. And so I think for a lot of people, it is default. It's maybe naive. But I think for Lucy, it was a choice. And he was happy and satisfied with that choice.
16:29 Speaker 02 Even though the town of Thomaston is small, and he has been content there, he has had a journey too. Because he goes from Berman Court in one section of that town to another section of town that's slightly more affluent. And he ends up in the borough where what limited wealth there is in this town exists. So it's not like he hasn't taken a journey at all. He hasn't gone to Venice, but he's gone somewhere. And that world isn't as large as Noonan's world, but it's larger than you would think at first glance because it's so centered in Ike Lubin's.
17:09 Oprah Winfrey? And it speaks to the fact that you can still have meaning, lead a really powerful, meaningful life, powerful for you, meaningful life, living and remaining in a small town. On page 65, Lucy says, "In America, my mother claimed that the very luckiest were insulated against failure, just as it was the unavoidable destiny of the luckless to remain thwarted. I still remember how much this upset me. There wasn't supposed to be any limit to the benefits of hard work and honesty. And her saying that there were limits implied that she didn't believe in America, or worse, in us."
17:46 Oprah Winfrey? I know your time is so valuable to you, dear listeners, so I thank you for joining my conversation with the much beloved and celebrated Pulitzer Prize winning author, Richard Russo. His sixth novel, Bridge of Sighs, is my 117th Oprah's Book Club selection. Coming up, our audience has questions that explore small-town life, self-exploration, and finding meaning, themes which run deep throughout this compelling story. Maybe you left your hometown, or maybe you chose to stay. Do you ever think about your life if you had made a different choice? We're going to answer that question. Stay with us.
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18:56 Oprah Winfrey? I welcome you back to Oprah's Book Club. We're in Seattle, the home of Starbucks, and I'm talking with legendary author Richard Russo about his sixth novel, Bridge of Sighs. It's a layered coming-of-age story about the dreams, both lost and realized, of three friends from small-town America. Let's get back to our conversation. Kiara in our audience has a question about what are the recurring metaphors in the novel. Kiara?
19:23 Speaker 07 Bridges are featured prominently throughout the story. First, with the narrow bridge that Lucy is afraid to cross, and then again with the famous Bridge of Sighs. And they come up throughout the novel many times. I'm curious, what do they represent in the novel?
19:46 Speaker 02 I guess most people find themselves crossing bridges. I think it's more a metaphor than anything else to get from one place to another. It may not be a physical bridge, but we pass through some kind of bridge. I think the most important bridge, in some ways, in this novel is the smallest of the bridges. Not the bridge of size, but that first bridge that Lucy Lynch has to cross over. And he's afraid to do.
20:20 Oprah Winfrey? And when he's held in the trunk?
20:21 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
20:23 Oprah Winfrey? That is traumatic.
20:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
20:27 Oprah Winfrey? That impacted him in ways that he didn't even realize.
20:29 Speaker 02 And is still impacting him at the end of the book.
20:32 Oprah Winfrey? At the end of the book.
20:33 Speaker 02 Because as a result of that, I mean, the trunk that he is locked in. And you learn towards the end that Bobby Marconi himself is not free of blame.
20:44 Oprah Winfrey? That's right. Bobby Marconi was there.
20:46 Speaker 02 And he was there. And as a result of that, Lucy has lived with these spells his entire life. And he's also learned a piece of wisdom that he wishes, in some ways, that he hadn't learned. His belief is that some people have to pay to cross the bridge, and other people don't. I'm not sure that the novel bears that out, Oprah, because I think the ending, the actual ending of the novel suggests, and certainly Robert Noonan seems to believe, that in the end, we all pay to cross that bridge. But from Lucy's point of view, it sure doesn't seem fair that some people have to pay, and other people don't have to pay.
21:30 Oprah Winfrey? So who is Lucy? Is he a composite of other people you knew, or is he completely made up?
21:36 Speaker 02 Lucy is certainly more made up than Noonan is. Lucy and his father are based on people from my own childhood. I had a much-beloved, adored uncle who had a milk truck. He delivered milk throughout Glover'sville, New York. And he would let.
22:00 Oprah Winfrey? When milk was in bottles?
22:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, when milk was in bottles, right, right.
22:05 Oprah Winfrey? Milk used to be in bottles.
22:07 Speaker 02 See, you see people in the audience going, "What? What?"
22:11 Oprah Winfrey? It's to deliver milk and bottles to your door, yes.
22:13 Speaker 02 And he would let me, and his...
22:16 Oprah Winfrey? Not in my neighborhood. We had our own cow.
22:21 Oprah Winfrey? It was my job to take the cow out to the pasture every day. But anyway, go ahead.
22:26 Speaker 02 But, but he would allow, he would allow my, uh, my cousin and me to surf the truck.
22:34 Oprah Winfrey? Wow.
22:35 Speaker 02 So that, so that's a detail that, that did come from, from my own life. But there were, on, um, um, on one side of the family, it, it did seem to me that there were these, these wonderful, generous, optimistic, and yes, naive, human beings. Where on the other side of my family, there was a, there was a, there was a kind of ingrained cynicism. Um, that was more likely to put people in motion. I think one of the things about Bobby Marconi becoming Robert Noonan is that that begins with motion. He has to go. Um, he has to, he has to leave this place.
23:13 Oprah Winfrey? Leave the town, yes.
23:14 Speaker 02 Um, in order to discover, uh, in order to discover who he is, he's not going to discover it there.
23:20 Oprah Winfrey? Uh, and he has... As is the case for a lot of people, having to leave small towns.
23:23 Speaker 02 Yeah.
23:23 Oprah Winfrey? I mean, which made me think about, you know, I was born and raised for the earliest years of my life, a small town in Casillasco, Mississippi. Who would I have been? Do you all ever think about this? Who would you have been if you had stayed? Do you think about this, James? Who, who would you have been if you had stayed? I would be in Mississippi with a grocery store that everybody came by the grocery store. I would be the town, place where everybody gathered. And we wouldn't just sell vegetables and food and stuff, but it would be the gathering place. And I would be doing exactly what I'm doing now. I would be, say, "Honey, come on over here. Let me talk to you." "Yes, it's time for you to leave that man, I gotta say."
24:07 Oprah Winfrey? You know, it would be, it would be, it would be the gathering place for people. That's what I think.
24:13 Speaker 02 Can I ask you a question?
24:13 Oprah Winfrey? Sure, ask me.
24:14 Speaker 02 Would that, would that have been a tragic thing?
24:20 Oprah Winfrey? No, it wouldn't have been a tragic thing because I wouldn't have known that there was a whole nother way of being.
24:24 Speaker 02 Yeah.
24:24 Oprah Winfrey? I would have found a way to manifest my personality.
24:29 Speaker 02 Uh huh.
24:30 Oprah Winfrey? And be who I am.
24:31 Speaker 02 Uh huh.
24:32 Oprah Winfrey? In an environment that would be conducive to that. But I would have risen in that environment. I do believe that.
24:38 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's a great answer because I don't think it would have been either. I mean, I mean, you, you are who you are Oprah and you have, my God, what you have done is just breathtaking and astonishing.
24:50 Speaker 02 But the other version of you, I suspect, would have been just as astonishing.
24:55 Oprah Winfrey? I would have been the deaconess in the church. I would have had the whole thing, you know, all of that thing. Krista's here and she said that she could relate to Bobby's complicated feelings about his father. Krista?
25:05 Speaker 04 Hi.
25:08 Speaker 04 There was a passage that spoke to me and it was when Bobby was reflecting on the different version of his father that he observed with Maxine as compared to at home with his mom. I'd like to read it. "Was there one thing he wanted an explanation for or everything? Without warning, his father had stopped being a simple man. Did Noonan want an explanation for the kindness he'd shown this Maxine and her idiot kid? Or for the mean spirited bullying he'd offered his mother and his brothers and himself? The best guy Willie had called him? In what reality was his father even a decent guy? It was as if the first 17 years of Noonan's life had taken place under a full moon that suddenly had waned, allowing his wolf of a father to take on the shape of an ordinary man.
25:51 Speaker 04 How had he managed to miss that transformation?" So, this made me think of my dad. So, my dad left my mom for another woman after 25 years of marriage. And the person he is today is very different from the person I grew up with. And so, I wonder, you know...
26:10 Speaker 02 If the the real crime was the environment he created in my home. His, you know, short temper or lack of affection. Or was it that he married the wrong person? And I think that the book asked the question. Can you change or are you always the same person at your core? But when you do change, which version of you is your true self? And how much of who we are is determined by the people in our lives?
26:40 Speaker 02 Thank you. Thank you.
26:43 Oprah Winfrey? Yo, I'm gonna deeply sigh over the bridge for all of y'all. Wow. Deep questions here, Bridge of Sighs.
26:53 Speaker 02 And I think in order, I don't know if I have it. If that was exactly a question or but to comment on it, I would I would go
27:01 Speaker 02 to Noonan. Because I think that Noonan, when he becomes a painter, that's the that's the first stage of of something new for him. He becomes, by going to Venice and learning to paint, he's made an enormous change in his life. It's probably not as enormous, however, is the last change in his life, which takes place just before he comes back to America for his last, as it turns out, final show. And something very surprising happens to him there because he's he's painting that what people think of as a self-portrait. He's painting his father, his rage against his father that he has protected,
27:45 Speaker 02 as if it is as if he might run out of it at some point. He's protected that
27:51 Speaker 02 that that rage. And throughout his paintings, not only that painting of his father, but other paintings. Hugh, his agent, refers to those paintings as being all worm. Because Noonan thinks of himself as somebody who's who's, if there's an apple there and there's a worm at the center of the apple, he's always he's always after the worm. And as his paintings have gotten darker and darker, Hugh says that they're all worm. There's this, there's nothing else. But at the end, the astonishing thing happens that he decides to paint Sarah, this woman that he was in love with all those years ago.
28:33 Speaker 02 And he sets up the easel, right next to the easel, the all worm version of his father. And when he begins to paint Sarah, it's as if the light from that painting of Sarah is now shedding on his father, and it changes his father's portrait. It's not all worm anymore. I think that's the big change in Noonan, is that his love for Sarah, even remembered all those years ago,
29:14 Speaker 02 proves stronger than his hatred of his father. So when you say, "Which is the real person?" I'll just throw the question back at you, but I think the real Robert Noonan is the one we see just before he dies.
29:31 Oprah Winfrey? And to add to that, because we all went, "Ooh", when you said, "Did your father marry the wrong person?" You marry the person that is going to most help you evolve into the person that you need to be. And perhaps being with your mother, even if it was, you know, they were not compatible, or he was not happy there, it helped him move on to a better version of himself. Just like many times, you're in a relationship with somebody who makes you better because their behavior is so the antithesis of what you really want. And so you recognize, "This is not what I want."
30:15 Oprah Winfrey? And so he moved out of that relationship and evolved into somebody that you don't recognize because he was a different person with her.
30:25 Speaker 02 And also, people can get really sick of themselves. You know, if you live the kind of life your father had lived with your mother and was unhappy about that, that's another way of saying that he was really sick of the person that he was. And when he had a chance to do something different, he did. And I would only say to add on to that, one of the things that, to my mind, has always been the thing that I love most about fiction writing.
30:58 Speaker 02 Is that it has saved me from, I mean, I still get sick of myself, believe me.
31:03 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah.
31:04 Speaker 02 But fiction writing, losing yourself in stories of people like Lucy Lynch and Bobby Marconi and Sarah, the four and a half years that it took to write that book, losing myself in their lives, was wonderful because it was a way to keep myself from being sick of myself, you know?
31:22 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah.
31:22 Speaker 02 That's, that's, that's the beauty of art. It allows you to, to not fall into that place of being trapped in yourself all the time.
31:30 Oprah Winfrey? Just a quick moment to say I'm so grateful you've joined us for this episode of Oprah's Book Club. When we come back, more of my conversation with Bridge of Size author, Richard Russo, my 117th Oprah's Book Club selection. Next, we're going to explore the complex relationships between mothers and sons. And I asked something I've wondered while reading Bridge of Size, how did Richard learn to write so profoundly from a woman's perspective? We've got more thought provoking questions from the audience after the break, so stay with us, book lovers. This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them.
32:13 Oprah Winfrey? But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home with agents who close twice as many deals. When you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get started at redfin.com. Own the dream. Welcome back, listeners. I am in the beautiful Emerald City of Seattle for this episode of Oprah's Book Club, presented by Starbucks. In case you didn't already know, Seattle is the hometown of Starbucks. And I'm with an audience of readers. We're talking to bestselling author, Richard Russo, about his book, Bridge of Size, my latest Book Club selection. It's a sweeping saga that invites readers to contemplate life's biggest questions.
32:57 Oprah Winfrey? Let's get back to more of those questions from the audience. Karen in our audience has a question about the relationships between mothers and her children. Karen?
33:06 Speaker 02 One of the themes of the book that really resonated for me personally was the complicated relationships between mothers and sons. So my question is, how did your relationship with your own mother influence these?
33:19 Speaker 04 And did you find that the mothers took the brunt of the blame for the shortcomings of the fathers? And did you consider that with creating Lucy?
33:31 Speaker 02 I don't want to overgeneralize here, but I loved my mother deeply. I owe her more than I could ever express here, here or anywhere. But growing up, I could be a little prick sometimes. And I think that boys, especially, my parents separated, so there was only my mother. And whenever anything went wrong, there was nobody to blame but her. And I think that there were times, especially when I was younger, and like most boys, if there was only one, whoever's handy, you know? And my mother was handy.
34:07 Speaker 02 But I would also say that her dream, for me, more than anything else, was responsible for the person who, sitting here in front of you today. She was absolutely determined. And some of her gifts to me were like that. Here's what we're gonna do. She laid out the blueprint, and by God, we followed that blueprint, you know, step by step by step, always. But some of the greatest influences, the influence that she had on me, was lessons she was teaching me that she didn't even know she was teaching. For one thing, she had a very hard life. She worked in Schenectady, an hour away from where we lived in Glover'sville. She worked at General Electric.
34:52 Speaker 02 When she came home after a hard day, she still had me to deal with, all the things that I would need in school the next day, laundry that had to be done, her own dinner that had to be cooked. And at the end of that long day, and it's now coming towards like nine o'clock before her day is done, and it started at six. And at the end of that long day, what she did, instead of turning on the TV, was she sat down and read.
35:20 Speaker 02 She never told me to read. She never thought, she never suggested to me that it would be a good idea. She simply showed by example, this is what you do to reward yourself at the end of a long day. And made me, without ever even suggesting it to me, made me into a voracious reader. And I can tell you, I think it's, I'm not sure if it's true for every writer, but I don't think you can be a writer without being a reader. And, and that's, I mean, that was her first gift to me, the first of many, many, many gifts.
35:54 Speaker 02 And both her example and her faith in our ability to change our lives was pivotal at every stage of my childhood, adolescence, and well into, went well into my adulthood.
36:14 Oprah Winfrey? Thanks, Karen. There was a famous model who was on the Oprah Show many years ago. I'll never get, but she told me that she noticed the moment that she walked into a room and heads no longer turned when she came into the room. And you write this about aging. You say, "Then the change, as if one morning she looked at herself in the mirror and saw into the future, that before long even the most desperate and befuddled of the sundry arms divorcees would stop coming to her for solace. Probably she saw too, where all the martinis had settled in the dark bags under her eyes. Her sunken cheeks had breasts.
36:55 Oprah Winfrey? Possibly it wasn't even the bathroom mirrors so much as the one on men's faces where she did not register anymore. Or worse, she registered briefly, but then didn't pass the test. Sex had been the currency of her life, and soon she'd be broke. If her husband had talked a good game, well, at least he was still in business. That was something you could still do. Whereas, for all Sarah knew, her father may have even warned her about the day when she'd flirt and no one would flirt back. When men no longer would gather around her at parties for the privilege of looking down her blouse. When she'd have to face what little remained and face it alone."
37:40 Oprah Winfrey? I want to know how you knew how to write this from a woman's perspective.
37:47 Speaker 02 If you had only my first two novels, I don't think you probably would have come to that conclusion, because those first two books were about male misbehavior. I was a much younger writer then, and I didn't have a lot of major female characters in those books. But I don't think any male writer wants to publish a book with a lot of female characters and have a reviewer say, "God, he doesn't know a damn thing about women, does he?" And so I think my first couple of books, I didn't allow as many female characters to come in as my later ones. But there was a point in my life where I looked around, Oprah,
38:32 Speaker 02 and suddenly, all the important people in my life were women. There was my wife. By then, I had two daughters. My mother was still alive. So how do you write from a woman's point of view? One pretty good tactic, although it wasn't a tactic on my part, it just happened, be surrounded by women and keep your eyes open. For God's sake, observe. You're never going to be a woman. You're going to have to indulge in your imagination. But that's really like almost anything else that writers write about. We write about people whose lives, whose lived experiences are much different from our own.
39:17 Speaker 02 I mean, one of my favorite characters is my sister Ursula from The Horace Child, who is an octogenarian Belgian nun. What business did I have at age 40 writing about an octogenarian Belgian nun? I was never going to be a woman, never going to be a nun. I'd never set foot in Belgium and never been sold by my father to a convent. What possible business did I have writing about this woman? But that's the task, is to imagine lives different from your own.
39:59 Speaker 02 And the only way to do that is use the tools at hand. And in my case...
40:08 Speaker 02 Being surrounded by women at that stage in my life, along the time of "nobody's fool," suddenly there were women everywhere and I wasn't so terrified anymore of being a writer who would be panned in reviews for not knowing anything about women.
40:28 Oprah Winfrey? Well, you got it.
40:29 Speaker 02 Thank you.
40:31 Oprah Winfrey? I think you have such a beautiful way of phrasing the big questions we all have about life. One of my favorite passages from page 620 is about the road not taken. You say, "Don't even the best and most fortunate of lives hint at other possibilities at a different kind of sweetness, and, yes, bitterness, too. Isn't this why we can't help feeling cheated even when we know we haven't been?" Do you think most people feel cheated?
41:01 Speaker 02 Sure.
41:01 Oprah Winfrey? You do?
41:03 Speaker 02 But not in their best moments.
41:06 Oprah Winfrey? Do you guys think most people feel cheated? Hmm. Yeah.
41:13 Speaker 02 You don't wish you had two go-arounds? Another chance to try something different? No? Okay.
41:22 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah? Okay, okay. Do most people feel cheated? Raise your hands. I think women do. You think women do?
41:29 Speaker 02 Oh, that's interesting.
41:30 Oprah Winfrey? That's interesting. Why? Why do women feel cheated? I think because we are cheated. From the time from the time we're born, we have all of these societal expectations to squelch who we are and what we can do. And I think now that I'm in my 50s, that rooster has come home to roost, in a sense. And I think I realize it now more than I ever have and I also don't care anymore, so I talk about it a lot. So, anyway, I think we feel cheated because women are cheated.
42:15 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah. This reminds me of that passage of the book. This is on page 583 in your hymnals.
42:23 Oprah Winfrey? You write that the men never felt trapped. They never wondered about the mountain road not taken. Never felt as though some important part of them was withering as another flourished. Never were greedy for what they didn't have and would never experience. But many of the women in the book did, of course, admit feeling trapped in their marriages. You know, but the men never felt trapped because they weren't.
42:47 Speaker 02 Yeah.
42:48 Oprah Winfrey? Because they weren't. So does that represent contentment? Or is that the essence of settling? What do you think?
42:54 Speaker 02 Well, I think Sarah is the is the is the character there through whom a lot of that gets investigated. Towards the end of the book, she leaves Lucy and is not sure she's coming back. And it's because she's trying to locate her mother, who she knows has died. But she's trying to locate her mother, I think, for her mother. If her mother were alive, she might be able to explain some things about Sarah's own life that she has never been able to understand and is trying to understand now. And so she goes on this. She goes on this seemingly bizarre quest for for an answer to a question that she thinks
43:39 Speaker 02 when she first arrives on on Long Island. She thinks she's she she may be on a quest that's simply impossible to to to succeed in, only to discover that, no, there was a reason that she was there, a very important reason that she was there. And her sense that something was was missing. When she first starts out on that journey, you think, oh, God, this is this is a lunatic quest. No good could possibly come of this. And yet, the longer she's away, the longer she's away from the life that she wouldn't trade, she wouldn't trade her husband in, she wouldn't. She knows that in many respects that she's been lucky and lived a and lived a fortunate life.
44:24 Speaker 02 But that unanswered that unanswered question, I think she she does feel a little cheated. And I think that that. She doesn't know what it is, but there's something missing. What on earth is it that is, that is missing? And if you don't, if you don't at least suspect that there's something missing, you're not going to find out what it might be.
44:43 Oprah Winfrey? And this line I love too. This is on page 563. "The line of gray along the horizon is brighter now. And with the coming light, I feel a certainty. There is, despite our wild imaginings, only one life. The ghostly others, no matter how real they seem, no matter how badly we need them, are phantoms. The one life we're left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy, and then to shatter them, and it never, ever lets up. Blame love. Blame love." Thank you, Richard Russo. Thank you so much.
45:16 Speaker 02 Thank you.
45:21 Oprah Winfrey? Thank you. And this fantastic Seattle audience, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for your questions.
45:27 Speaker 02 Thank you so much.
45:28 Oprah Winfrey? This is my favorite thing to do, talk about books. Bridge of Sides is available wherever books are sold. And did you have to go back and read it yourself to remind yourself of what you'd written after I called?
45:39 Speaker 02 I absolutely did.
45:41 Oprah Winfrey? You did?
45:42 Speaker 02 And what, what I would like to tell you now, Oprah, is that as honored as I am, and believe I am so honored that you have chosen this book for your book club. You also gave me a wonderful, great gift. Because after Bridge of Sides, this book was a struggle. It's my longest, my most complex book. It has the widest angle lens. It has the most characters in it, and the most time elapses. That's what makes a book big. And I had not thought about this book since it was published. Because I had other books.
46:25 Speaker 02 Once a book is published, you can't help these people in this book anymore. They're on their own. And I had, and so I wrote, I wrote other books. And this was never a book that, that Hollywood was interested in. And so I had no particular reason to revisit it. And Oprah, I read this book as if someone else had written it. I had forgotten almost the whole thing.
46:48 Oprah Winfrey? Wow.
46:48 Speaker 02 And I was, and I was, it was just such a gift. To fall in love with these characters again. As if someone else had written the book. I can't thank you enough, I don't think. But for this, I would have ever given another moment's thought to this novel.
47:05 Oprah Winfrey? The Bridge of Sighs. You fell in love again with Lucy. You fell in love again.
47:11 Speaker 02 I did.
47:14 Oprah Winfrey? That is so great. I didn't know I did that, but I'm happy. I'm happy to be able to do that for you, okay? Before we go, I want to share that I recently published something tailor-made for you avid readers. So delighted to tell you about it. It's my book lover's journal, and here's what's great. Has over 100 prompts, like the first book that made you feel seen, and the book that reminded you of what matters most. All designed to enhance your reading experience. It's a great gift for book lovers, and I hear book clubs are using it when they meet, which makes me so happy. I write about some of my favorite books in first sentences. Don't you love a good first sentence? Do you struggle with that first sentence?
47:54 Speaker 02 Well, usually, what happens is that the first sentence of the book appears in the first draft on page 375. And you go, and you think, oh, God, that's it.
48:04 Oprah Winfrey? That's it, that's the sentence.
48:06 Speaker 02 I don't, it's not the first sentence that I write. It's, it's, it's.
48:09 Oprah Winfrey? It's somewhere in the.
48:10 Speaker 02 It's years later, I say that, oh, my God, that's the first sentence of the book.
48:14 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah. There's a whole book about first sentences, actually. I love it. So, thank you so much for being here. Thank you all. Oprah's Book Lover's Journal, available anywhere you buy your books, audience. You're all going to get a copy. There you go. Thanks again to our fantastic partner, Starbucks, for supporting Oprah's Book Club. Next time you head to your neighborhood Starbucks, bring a friend and your copy of Bridge of Sighs, and try this month's pairing, the Manila Sweet Cream Cold Brew. Go well, everybody. Thanks so much. Thank you.
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