Patchett, Kingsolver & Lee on the Art—and Uncertainty—of Being a Modern Novelist

For literary fiction fans, 2026 has been a banner year, with new novels from award-winning American authors Barbara Kingsolver (“Partitia”), Min Jin Lee (“American Hagwon”), and Ann Patchett (“Whistler”). But amid shortening attention spans and fears that the ‘end of reading’ is fast approaching, what role do novels still play in modern life, and what does it take to find success as a writer today? Kara speaks with Barbara, Min and Ann about the unifying themes across their latest novels, how they’ve adapted to changes in the publishing industry over the last few decades, and how they continue to reach new, younger audiences. The authors also bring their own burning questions for each other. Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  No matter what book you're reading, whether it's The Dragon Against the Girl or Moby Dick or what, if you're reading, you are engaging with that capacity to imagine another life.

• 0:25Kara Swisher?

  Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. We've got a really special episode for you today. I'm speaking with three of the most celebrated American novelists of our time. Their careers span decades, and combined, they've won pretty much every prestigious literary award you can think of. Lucky for us, they've all released new books in the last few months, and I thought, let's just bring them together. Often, you do separate interviews with these people, but I don't care. It's my podcast. I can do what I want, and we have done it. Barbara Kingsolver is the author of more than a dozen books, including Demon Copperhead, which won her Pulitzer Prize. Her latest novel, Partita, is about an aspiring concert pianist whose life is upended by love and tragedy. It hits on some of her favorite themes

• 1:10Kara Swisher?

  like class divides, ambition, and the power of art. Min Jin Lee is the author of the novels Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko. The latter was a finalist for the National Book Award. Lee just released her third novel after nearly a decade, American Hwangwon. It follows a formerly middle-class Korean family as they try to rebuild their lives and find financial stability in California. And Anne Patchett is the winner of this year's Library of Congress Prize for her body of fiction, including bestsellers like The Dutch House and Bel Canto. Her latest novel, Whistler, is about a woman who reconnects with her stepfather after decades of separation and a tragic accident that changed their lives. Patchett also owns her own independent bookstore in Nashville. Why do I want to talk

• 1:54Kara Swisher?

  to these authors together? Because there's a lot of topics about the business, the publishing industry, making a life with art and the books themselves, and because it's really interesting when you bring people together. I'm very excited. One more thing before we dive in. I'm doing a tour with the one and only Scott Galloway. Very different from these women. That's right. This November, we're bringing our show Pivot on the road. We're stopping in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Denver, San Francisco, and New York. We'll get into AI, the midterms, and every billionaire behaving badly in social media. I'll also do my best to keep Scott in line in front of the live audience. God help me. So if we're coming to a city near you, grab tickets before we sell out and bring your best questions for the live Q and A. Get tickets at pivottour.com.

• 2:38Kara Swisher?

  That's pivottour.com. All right, let's get to my conversation with these three amazing authors and legends. Our expert question comes from New Yorker's staff writer and book critic, Becca Rothfeld. She was previously the nonfiction book critic at The Washington Post. It's not every day you get to sit down with three titans of the literary world like this. So now you can, and don't go anywhere.

• 3:11Kara Swisher?

  I'm Anna Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. We talk all about attending a fashion show in Paris together, throwing dinner parties, and making her Broadway debut in other desert cities. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers.

• 3:49Speaker 02

  How far would you go to have a healthy baby?

• 3:51Speaker 03

  Embryo editing is very much illegal in the United States. It is illegal in most countries. But there is growing interest as the technology has gotten better.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  This week on Explain It to Me, The Ethics of Embryo-Maxing. Listen to new episodes Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 4:20Kara Swisher?

  Barbara, Min, and Anne, thank you for coming on.

• 4:23Speaker 04

  Thank you for having us.

• 4:24Kara Swisher?

  You're welcome.

• 4:25Speaker 05

  Thanks so much for having us.

• 4:27Kara Swisher?

  So it's a real treat to have you all together. I wanted to have this conversation because I want to talk about what it means to write and sell a novel right now. And obviously, all three of you are quite successful at all these things. Now, all three of your latest novels have some broad themes in common: family bonds, trauma, and how past influences the present. We'll get into how each of you specifically tackles these ideas. But broadly, why do you think these are important themes to explore right now in 2026? Let's start with Barbara, and then Min, and then Anne.

• 4:57Speaker 00

  Well, I think that processing trauma is universal. And it's every one of us has had parts of our lives that were broken. And I think that literature is one of those things that connects us, that helps us feel connected through our processes of repair so that we feel less lonely. And I think one of the hardest things about the times we're in is loneliness, is people feeling alienated from family, from friends, from their government, from the happenings in the world just because it's so difficult to take care of everything at once.

• 5:39Kara Swisher?

  And you're also connected like never before in a weird fashion.

• 5:43Speaker 00

  Right. In a way that feels very passive in a certain sense because we learn every day about 10,000 terrible things that we can do absolutely nothing about. So it makes us feel helpless.

• 5:59Kara Swisher?

  Min?

• 6:00Speaker 05

  You know, right now, as a social novelist, I feel very strongly that I wanted to write about things that matter today. So even though I am writing about education and Koreans, what I'm really trying to write about are economic shocks and technological revolution, and how that affects parenting, and how that affects what it means to be a student, and what higher education should mean to ordinary people, not just in Korea, not just in America, but around the world. And I want that discussion to happen because I think that in many ways we have really relegated our responsibilities, and we're not talking about it. I think the politicians have been deeply cowardly about this issue because every parent I know is really worried about what does education mean to us.

• 6:44Kara Swisher?

  Absolutely. Against this backdrop of changing technology, correct? Or how to keep up, including with AI or anything else?

• 6:52Speaker 05

  And also the lack of information about economics. Right now, I think the bond market's really important, and the world doesn't want to pay attention to it. But it affects, let's say, the cost of education. Our education loans can't be forgiven, or you can't go into bankruptcy. So I think that when parents are having these very intense discussions about what education should mean, they are not being fully informed, and they're not being advocated.

• 7:16Kara Swisher?

  Anne?

• 7:17Speaker 04

  I so agree with everything that Min and Barbara are saying. And I feel like I'm writing a smaller novel about love. And that if I have a message, it's that while the world is burning and things are going to hell in every direction, there are also tremendous kindness, good people connections. And I just want to underscore that because I feel like as we're throwing everything out the window, often we're losing sight of the decency that is around us.

• 7:59Kara Swisher?

  Barbara, your new novel, Partita, centers on a woman from rural Tennessee named Livia. It jumps back and forth between her past as a virtuoso pianist who's estranged from family and also consumed by her first real love, and her present, followed by an unexpected phone call from that old lover. And like the character of Livia, you're also from rural Appalachia and started college on a piano scholarship and writing this character who partially mirrors your own story. Did you have any personal revelations about your relationships? And I know everyone asks you about your relationship to rural America, but it's pertinent here.

• 8:35Speaker 00

  Well, sure, and the answer is no, I didn't really have any revelations about my own life. I actually, I'm gonna steal from Anne while she's watching, because we actually spoke on the stage three nights ago together.

• 8:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 8:53Speaker 00

  And this always comes up, are you, if, because there are parallels, because this character is a pianist, and I play piano, she went to college, I went to college. And Anne said it beautifully, she said, "I used ingredients from my pantry. Of course, I have experience, I have a brief experience with conservatory. I only lasted a year before I figured out that is not the life for me. But because I had experienced that really unusual, very intense, very focused world of music and of people creating art, that's a really good sturdy ingredient from my pantry that I can use.

• 9:33Speaker 00

  And yes, it is said in Southern Appalachia, this is where I live, and I can tell you that Appalachia is so profoundly underrepresented in our, all of our media, movies, television, the news, magazines, et cetera. People outside the region don't even know how to say it, how to pronounce it, which is, was very telling to me, that we have not been allowed to speak for ourselves, about ourselves. So I could write 100 novels that are reflecting the Appalachian experience, and every one of them would be different. Demon Copperhead was my attempt at sort of the saga, the great Appalachian novel that

• 10:18Speaker 00

  brings together history, you know, inherited, sort of institutional poverty and all of that, the large social realist novel. And I wanted to write a much smaller one this time, as Anne says, a little, something about love. And it is a little love story that kind of grew, because it's also about, you know, art and survival and all kinds of things. But I just wanted to show that there are many kinds of Appalachians.

• 10:50Kara Swisher?

  Absolutely. My grandparents are from there, in deep West Virginia, and it's so misrepresented. So it's, you know, I didn't grow up there, so I can't claim, so I'm sort of like, if J.D. Vance were honest, he's not really from there. But I remember thinking it was such a different, there are different people there, and it never was quite, it was represented in a way that wasn't, I mean, you could find those people.

• 11:14Speaker 00

  Well, that's ugly.

• 11:15Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, you could find those people, there's no question, but it was, yeah.

• 11:18Speaker 00

  We are all kinds of people.

• 11:19Kara Swisher?

  We contain multitudes. I'd love you, Min and Anne, talk about that idea of ingredients, because I think it's an interesting thread to pull on, the idea of ingredients and how you put together these books.

• 11:32Speaker 05

  You know, it's funny, I feel like my pantry is there, and I do use it, of course. I use it a lot for the emotions. And then in terms of the actual work, I do so much research, I pretend that I'm an anthropologist or a sociologist and a journalist without deadlines, because I write really slow. And I get to talk to, but really, I get to question people and to listen to what they have to say about work. I write about work. It's really important that, in light of all the different topics that I choose, I'm interested in the nature of a person's day and how they support themselves. Like, my characters usually don't have trust funds, and I want to understand, well, how

• 12:15Speaker 05

  do you care for yourself, and how do you care for other people? What happens to you when you have a global financial crisis? Does the stock market affect your life? And in order to do that, I have to go out there, so I go to the grocery store, I guess. So I have the pantry, which is awesome, because I must use it for the emotional truth of what I want to say. But if I didn't go to the grocery store and visit museums, I don't think I'd make it.

• 12:40Kara Swisher?

  Go ahead, Anne.

• 12:42Speaker 04

  So, when I was younger, and I may cycle back around to this later in my life, but I wrote books like Bel Canto and State of Wonder and Run, and, I mean, books that were so far away from me, and I did a ton of research. Run is a book that's largely about ichthyology. If you want to know a subject I went in knowing nothing about. Bel Canto, about opera, didn't know anything about it, did a ton of research, loved that, was so happy doing that. And part of it was, I wanted to make sure that nobody thought that I was writing about myself.

• 13:23Speaker 04

  And at some point in my life, I thought, I just don't care what anybody thinks. If people think that these are books that are just taken directly from my life, it's fine. If people think that I used to be an ichthyologist, that's fine. The idea that you can't control how your work is read was a great relief.

• 13:49Kara Swisher?

  I think you use the metaphor of an actor, right? You don't think Meryl Streep can turn her head around, or whatever she happens to do. I think it was one of you said that.

• 13:57Speaker 00

  No, that was me, and I've talked with actors about this process of inhabiting a character by thinking about the parts of your life that inform the character emotionally, even if the character's really different. But somehow or other, you know, when Meryl Streep plays a murderer, a woman who murdered her child, nobody asks her, now, was that based on your own murder? And yet, they ask us.

• 14:25Kara Swisher?

  She's very murderous, in case you know.

• 14:27Speaker 00

  Yes, Meryl, exactly. No, it is funny that, I figured this out a long time ago, because I agree, Min, the most fun is going to the grocery store. The most fun, I love research, I love interrogating people about their jobs and the, you know, the everyday details of their working lives, because everybody in your novel has to have a job. And there, you know, dozens, hundreds of people over time that you create, and yet it's never gonna be far enough from your life that people will not say, isn't this based on you? And it finally occurred to me that, well, one, this is a compliment, because they believe it, they can't believe you would make up anything that feels so real to them.

• 15:12Speaker 00

  I guess they don't want to feel like it's a hoodwink. And the other thing is that, when you write a novel, people will insist on believing every single part of it is true. And when you write a nonfiction book, they will dedicate themselves to doubting your facts.

• 15:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  So, and I've, you know, I've done, I've done both, nearly half my books are nonfiction. So, as Anne says, you reach a point where you say, that's not my job, to manage what people think.

• 15:44Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, what did you lie about in your farm book? I don't know.

• 15:47Speaker 00

  You know, it's really more, it's really more about what I left out.

• 15:52Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 15:53Speaker 00

  People think that's a memoir. Some huge things happened during that year, including the death of an immediate family member, which never made it into the book, because that's not what I was writing about. So that's, you know, if that's a lie of omission, it's in service of craft, in service of the book, and we, you know, we control that, that's our job.

• 16:13Kara Swisher?

  So, one of the things that you've all talked about is economic disruption, where in one of those moments, doesn't feel rich, you know, mortgage rates just went up, you know, the only people that feel rich are the billionaires, who I write about quite a lot, in a nonfiction way. I'd like you each to sort of talk about this between yourselves, about what, how you think about using that economic disruption, which isn't a new thing, Steinbeck wrote about it, lots of people, I mean, it happens over and over again. Why don't you start, Min, since you brought up the bond market?

• 16:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, sure. I think that one of the reasons why the current novel that I wrote is set between the Asian financial crisis and the US global financial crisis, it's set between 1992 to 2007, so it ends right before the US financial crisis occurs, which becomes a global financial crisis, is because I wanted to talk about when you have faceless villains. If I talk to you about colonialism or war, very often people go, oh, that's the bad guy, right? And we're the good guys. And I'm actually saying economics and understanding economics is actually everybody's responsibility. And very often, when we have leaders who aren't really taking care of us, when we don't have social safety nets, it's very difficult to raise children, to go to work

• 17:27Speaker 05

  without having an email saying, your entire department has been erased, what are you gonna do? And that's happening today. So, when I wrote the first sentence, the rules of engagement have changed already. I'm talking about the way we interact with each other in every single field in the world. And those rules of engagement have changed, and they've become almost cruel. I can't believe the inhumanity of the way we interact with each other. And the things that we say to each other behind the scrim of anonymity, and also, we're even interacting with bots. So very often, we're not even dealing with truth tellers, we're dealing with machines. And I really liked your conversation with Sherri Turkle.

• 18:06Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, she's great.

• 18:07Speaker 05

  When she talked, she's amazing. And this whole idea that we have shifted from an attention economy to an attachment economy, where human beings are now becoming attached to machines.

• 18:18Speaker 04

  Whether it's a bot, or whether it's your phone or a device, whether it's hardware or software, we have somehow humanized this thing. And I think that that's an urgent, urgent crisis that I think novelists can handle.

• 18:29Kara Swisher?

  Absolutely. Barbara, you also, there is a feeling of economics between Livia and the people she goes to school with, and you can feel it throughout the book.

• 18:40Speaker 00

  Well, it's about class. It's about the barriers to working class people, working class kids, for example, going to college, that we never talk about in this country. We talk about racism and discrimination in many other areas, but we don't talk about classism, how difficult it is to be a class migrant, how so many of the people in this country who don't live close to big cities are really dealing in their own community economies where they don't have access to healthcare, or public transportation, or any of the things that are taken, kind of taken for granted

• 19:22Speaker 00

  as Americans. So I wanted to really sort of show, just walk the reader through the, kind of the harrowing experience of being a working class kid catapulted into this very elite university world, conservatory world, where she feels like she does not know the rules. Nobody told her, you know, she feels very much an outsider and very much adrift.

• 19:51Kara Swisher?

  Right. Which is something Min you've talked about a lot, being not of Princeton. Let me get to this idea of diaspora, and also family, and like, what holds us together. Because one of the things that Min wrote about was, quote, "Now, the modern person's permanent condition is being in that position." Can you talk about what you mean, in the theme of people sort of drifting and not feeling in place?

• 20:15Speaker 05

  Yes, diaspora is a Bible word. It's Greek, and it's meant to talk initially about the Jews who are being scattered around the world. So it's also a Christian concept now. And obviously, what I really want to say is actually, it's a global concept, and it's a modern person's concept. So when Barbara talks about a person from Appalachia going to an elite school, that's educational diaspora. We are experiencing that right now. You can have economic diaspora, where you don't have jobs anymore in a certain place, and therefore, you must go somewhere else to get work. And your entire family is disrupted by it. You can have environmental diaspora, where in places as beautiful as California, doesn't have water anymore in certain towns, so your house is worthless. So unless we study the idea of migration, and why we're forced

• 20:59Speaker 05

  to leave, and how we change the communities around us when we get there, not only about us being assimilated, but how actually we assimilate others, I don't think we're really going to have an honest discussion about modern society. So that's what I really want to write about. Obviously, I write about Koreans, but I think that the issues that I'm writing about are applicable to other people.

• 21:19Kara Swisher?

  And you're writing about connection, like, a very significant connection that was lost and then regained again. But, Anne, talk about that idea of feeling not where you belong.

• 21:29Speaker 04

  You know, I'm so interested in what Min and Barbara are saying in this conversation. And I think it's so important, I would like to defer, and let it go back to them, because this isn't what I'm doing. And it's really important what they're talking about.

• 21:46Speaker 00

  But it is important, Anne, because you talk about family, and you talk about connection.

• 21:50Kara Swisher?

  Correct.

• 21:50Speaker 00

  And that's, I feel, I feel like the great dialectic of American life is that our mythologies all applaud the lone hero, the solo flyer, the man who pulled himself up by his bootstraps. And real life, certainly for me, for people who live where I do, is about community. And we absolutely know our debt to the people who made us, to the people who are going to come over and bring casseroles when there's a death in the family, or an illness. We know how connected we are. And it is, it's very strange to live with these two realities at once. And I really love to

• 22:32Speaker 00

  write about that, about that permanent sort of tension between the will to establish yourself as an individual, the opportunity to do that, and the complete impossibility of leaving behind the people in the place who made you.

• 22:53Kara Swisher?

  Right. And the loneliness and that. And actually, Anne, I think you actually do belong, because what they're talking about is broken connections. And your book is about connection, the last scenes of someone leaning on your shoulder and remembering.

• 23:04Speaker 04

  It's absolutely about connections. But I, I am like someone who was dropped into a crevice in a glacier in 1970, and just stayed there. I don't have a cellphone. I have never engaged in social media, except the bookstore engages in social media. And I, I believe that I can stay in this place and preach the gospel from this corner of the world. We still read books. We still connect to one another. We have an amazing author series. Barbara was with

• 23:49Speaker 04

  us three nights ago. There were 1,200 people in the auditorium. And they were there because they loved Barbara, and they loved Partita. But they were also there because they're readers, wanting to connect with other readers, wanting, you know, wanting to spread the good news about books, to turn around to the stranger next to them, to say, what are you reading? What did you love? And that's the world I live in. And I have no fluency in this other world where it's all going to hell.

• 24:24Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 24:33Kara Swisher?

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• 25:18Kara Swisher?

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• 25:45Kara Swisher?

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• 26:58Kara Swisher?

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• 27:43Kara Swisher?

  kind of someone who loves really soft sheets, and usually, they're very expensive. These were not expensive, and they feel as if they are. Find the fall pieces. You'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was on with Kara Swisher. It's the best way to support the show. So the three of you are among the most celebrated modern American novelists, but the publishing industry has changed dramatically since you all started your careers, to say the least. Consolidation of publishing houses, arrival of eBooks, audiobooks, social media.

• 28:26Kara Swisher?

  We'll get to AI in a minute, but I know you don't want to, Anne, but you're going to have to. But how have each of you had to adapt the ways you sell and promote your books or think about writing them compared to when you were starting out? Anne, why don't you start, and then Min and Barbara?

• 28:41Speaker 04

  It hasn't changed, because I write the book for myself. And then, I never take a contract. Nobody ever sees any part of it until I'm finished with it. And when it is absolutely done, I call my editor and my agent, and I say, I've got a book. Do you want it? And we take it from there. So I've seen so many people come and go over the years, and I think that I am in a really rarefied position where I get to hold on

• 29:20Speaker 04

  to my dignity. And because everyone is very nice to me, I don't think that means they're nice to all the young authors coming up.

• 29:30Kara Swisher?

  Right. I mean, you do say in Whistler, at one point, one of the characters says to another, "Publishing was ruined. Amazon, Germans, the end of antitrust laws. You left in the Golden Age." So you're aware of the situation.

• 29:43Speaker 04

  No, I am absolutely aware of it. I am not directly impacted by it.

• 29:49Kara Swisher?

  Min?

• 29:51Speaker 05

  I think that publishing has changed dramatically. I have, I remember in 2006, my book came out in 2007, my first book, I got a website.

• 30:01Kara Swisher?

  This is free?

• 30:02Speaker 05

  Free for millionaires. And I remember several people said to me, "Why would you need a website?" And I remember thinking, "Well, because I would like my book to have a chance." And it still didn't have a chance. Like, it really took such a long time for the book to get picked up and to be studied and taught. And then, when Pachinko came out, I remember, it was 2016, the year before Pachinko came out, I asked my son's friends, who are going to be freshmen in college, I said, "I heard about this thing called Instagram. Can you help me? Because when I have events, nobody comes." And they said, "Okay." And these young women said, they felt so sorry for me because I was 48 years old. And they thought, this is 10 years ago. We need to help her

• 30:45Speaker 05

  because she's Sam's mom. And they helped me open my Instagram account. And I said, "What do you do with this thing? What's it for?" And they said, "Oh, you have to post images." And I said, "Why?" And they said, "Well, they have to like you." And I was like, "Why?" And I couldn't figure out what the relationship was between these images and why they would want to buy your book. But I did know that it was really humiliating to have events and for people to believe in you and to send you out on a plane and to buy a hotel room for you, and for nobody to come. So then, even then, even post Instagram, I remember I did a Pachinko event, and exactly two people showed up.

• 31:21Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 31:22Speaker 05

  My husband's cousin and a friend.

• 31:23Kara Swisher?

  Did you take them out to dinner?

• 31:24Speaker 05

  I would have, but we're so broke. I was so broke at the time. I just couldn't. But I would have if I could. I would now. I would now.

• 31:31Kara Swisher?

  Barbara?

• 31:32Speaker 00

  Well, I'm like Anne, very lucky. I guess I'm the one who fell down the glacial crevasse in 19, whenever it was, when my first novel came out, and have stayed there in a publishing sense, because I've had the same publisher for the 39 years of my career as an author. I've had, in that time, only three different editors, which is extraordinary. I really appreciate, my publisher has always treated me well. And like Anne, I turn in a book when it's good and ready. I don't do a contract in advance, because that would feel to me like being in debt. And I know it works for other people, and I know it's

• 32:15Speaker 00

  necessary for other people, but I really, I've always had modest expectations of this business, and that has paid off very well. You know, my first novel was a little novel. I didn't do a tour until, I think, my sixth book. It was my third novel. And they said, "Okay, now this thing's going to happen where you get on airplanes every single day, and you go around to different cities." And I said, "What? Can I wear the same clothes? Because I don't know how to do that." So, you know.

• 32:51Kara Swisher?

  But they're not doing that anymore. Just, you do everything online, right?

• 32:54Speaker 00

  Well, no, no, no. I'm on a 20-city tour.

• 32:58Kara Swisher?

  Oh, that's great.

• 32:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I think Min is also on a harrowing tour. Yes, but I am incredibly grateful to see these, you know, huge crowds of people coming together every night in a different city, because they love literature, because it's meaningful to them. I have adapted a little. I guess I climbed out of the crevasse to some extent, because I do have an Instagram account. And I only do it because I enjoy it, because I have seen how younger readers love to form communities around books. I just love this. Like, they'll make a stack of, they're all green books, you know? And that is, I just love that they're talking

• 33:43Speaker 00

  about books, but for, in whatever way. And so I thought, well, rather than have my readers age with me until, you know, we all die together, I thought, how nice it would be to engage with younger readers in the platforms that

• 33:59Kara Swisher?

  That they're comfortable in.

• 34:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I really love it. I really, and most, and my readers have remained, you know, sort of across the, all of the, all the generations are reading. And they say, "Oh, I love this book, Dema Copperhead. Do you have anything else?" And

• 34:16Speaker 04

  As a matter of fact.

• 34:19Kara Swisher?

  Yes, indeed. You can buy it at Parnassus Books.

• 34:23Speaker 00

  Yes, all 15 of them. But I just want to say alongside Anne, that the privilege of my life is that I have had, I have never worried about what people want to hear from me. My job, I think, is to think really hard about what it is I have to say, want to say, need to say, whether it seems marketable or not. I just do it. And I'm incredibly grateful that readers will follow me to places that might look difficult in a marketing meeting. Nobody has ever, ever told me, "Don't write about that." They say, "Thank you very much for this manuscript."

• 35:08Speaker 04

  And all, I would say, all four of us started out, you know, someplace far away, I can remember, for my first two books, they said, "Here's $3,000. Go as far as you can." And I did a 20-city tour in my car with one dress, stayed in truck stops, you know, because I, and two people would come, and they used to say, "Just go and be nice to the people who work in the bookstore. They'll remember you. They'll be grateful." So we all clawed our way, climbed our way up over time, and got more readers and better events. And that's just life.

• 35:51Kara Swisher?

  Although I was very insistent about the internet when I put out my book. I was quite, I was like, "The kids like it." To the publishers, they didn't have, they were not interested in.

• 36:01Speaker 04

  The internet didn't exist when I put out my first book.

• 36:04Kara Swisher?

  Yes, yes.

• 36:05Speaker 04

  You didn't have to worry about that.

• 36:06Kara Swisher?

  My book was about the internet and how it was going to kill everybody.

• 36:10Speaker 00

  Fair.

• 36:11Kara Swisher?

  So I had to warn people. But one of the things, all of you have pushed back, I think, in various interviews I've seen on this, there are statistics that people's attention spans have dramatically changed. Obviously, the big viral piece in The Atlantic, which I did not agree with either, but it had some scary statistics at the end. This is the end of reading piece. Fewer than half of all adults reported reading a book of any kind in 2022. Gambling has become more common leisure activity than reading. Books are simpler than they used to be with shorter sentences. And obviously, American kids' reading scores are in decline long, but I don't know how much lower they could go in many ways. But all of you don't buy into those fears. Min, why don't you talk first, and then Barbara and Anne?

• 36:50Speaker 05

  Actually, I think that I'm not worried about publishing or book buying. I'm not worried about that. I'm actually worried about America.

• 36:57Speaker 04

  That's good.

• 36:58Speaker 05

  Because, yeah, because you can see the rise of book sales, but not everybody can afford to buy a book.

• 37:05Kara Swisher?

  Right, right.

• 37:06Speaker 05

  Right? And also, when we are actually having budget cuts to libraries, then there are less books that are being bought. And also, when we're questioning the truth of media, then people are turning to the wrong sources for information. Like, if you're getting your news from TikTok and from Threads and Instagram, you're getting a very narrow, algorithm-driven piece of news, which means that in terms of civics of what happens to America, and if, and this is, you could look this up, I'm sure you already know, if the average reading level of the average American, not us necessarily, or your listeners, is sixth grade.

• 37:44Speaker 05

  Sixth graders can be wicked smart. However, sixth graders may not be able to tell what's verified versus what's unverified piece of information. And they may not know the context of why we tell a certain piece of news or statements. So what does this mean for America? Is that actually when we have an illiterate population, it only causes a greater disparity between the haves and the have-nots. The haves are going to be fully literate. And I feel like the dishonesty about that piece is to not recognize that maybe we don't want to say who's falling behind. Because some people are not falling behind, they're actually getting even smarter.

• 38:22Kara Swisher?

  Right. I'll put it before Ann and Barbara, sorry. Book sales have been driven by a smaller pool of people. The Atlantic article said a stat that just 20% of adults accounted for more than 80% of all books read last year. And this is sort of a niche hobby for a shrinking group of people, like a lot of ways. Ann, why don't you go first? Because you're obviously familiar as a writer and an owner of a bookstore.

• 38:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. My philosophy in life, just for myself, is to not set my hair on fire, but to figure out what I can do. I cannot change the world, but there are things that I can do that are in keeping with what's important to me. The bookstore has a foundation. We bring in authors and illustrators to Title I schools. We buy all the books. Because authors and illustrators don't go to Title I schools because the whole economic model is the parents have to buy the kid a book in order to get enough orders to get the author to go to that school.

• 39:28Speaker 04

  It's Dolly Parton stuff. It's not going to save anybody, but it's going to make a little dent. And I think if you can figure out how to make a little dent in what you see, and then you talk about it and tell people about it. I mean, every time I go out, I say, just find one teacher and say, I'll take you school supply shopping. Because teachers are buying the school supplies for their kids out of their own paltry salaries. Just figure out what you can do and do it. Because we can read the statistics, they're real, they're horrible.

• 40:12Speaker 04

  But that doesn't mean that we're absolved from responsibility. And certainly in my life, I've got this bookstore every day before we open up, there's a line of people outside.

• 40:23Kara Swisher?

  Right now, independent bookstores are seeing a surge. That's another interesting statistic.

• 40:27Speaker 04

  We have six people who work full time filling online orders. We're doing great. And what that means is we have to just keep plowing books back into our community. And also, I always say, Jeff Kinney and Dave Pilkey, my heroes, Captain Underpants, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, those books that engage young children in reading. Figure out a way to get those books to kids so they feel comfortable and confident with a book in their hand.

• 41:04Speaker 00

  I have such a different perspective when I see these statistics. I wonder, who are you measuring? And on what high mountain are you standing that you say literacy is falling apart? I grew up among people who did not go to college. I was the rare exception. Almost none of my friends went past 12th grade. And as a matter of fact, just barely over half of my class coming up from, you know, elementary school to high school, we were all the same kids in this town. And close to half didn't even make it to high school graduation. And yet, most of us came out of it literate.

• 41:48Speaker 00

  And that's an improvement on the generations before. My grandfather, my father in my father's family, I think my grandfather went to third grade, many, many people in my family could not read at all when you go back two generations. So I'm thinking, look, the general trend is upward. And if you want to go back even farther, we, kind of the European view of literary history is that Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes was the first novel novel. And it was a sensation. And everybody in Europe and everybody in Spain who could read, read that book.

• 42:32Speaker 00

  And that was about 12% of men and about maybe 2% of women, that's who was literate. That's who could read. So come on.

• 42:43Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's often like, sometimes when people are talking about, you know, I deal with a lot of these billionaires and this big mess and Trump and everything else. And one of the things they're saying, this is the worst time in American history. I'm like, no.

• 42:57Speaker 00

  No.

• 42:57Kara Swisher?

  Are you kidding?

• 42:58Speaker 00

  No.

• 42:59Kara Swisher?

  It's like Civil War, Japanese internment. I was like, we could go on, like, you know, Salem Witch Trials, and let's go back even further.

• 43:08Speaker 04

  And can I just say, I just reread Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion, published in 1968. I hadn't read it since college. Go back and read that book again. Because she is saying, I don't know what point there is in trying to write. Because if the world's over, we are just on fire. There has never been a worse or more depressing time.

• 43:32Kara Swisher?

  To be fair, that was her brand.

• 43:34Speaker 04

  It was her brand. No, it absolutely was her brand. But my God, she's singing the song that everybody is singing now. And again, I just come back to this idea of, so do what you can.

• 43:48Kara Swisher?

  Right. In that vein, Barbara, in an interview with The New Yorker, you proudly said you hadn't yet been updyked, which I think is a wonderful word.

• 43:55Speaker 00

  I didn't make that up. A sales rep went to one of my readings, I mean, one of my events, and he said, oh, there's young people there, a lot of young readers, so you're not getting updyked. And I said, what does that mean? And that's what he said. It meant that your readers grow old with you.

• 44:13Kara Swisher?

  Right. And apparently die with you, as you were noting. So when you think about, first you Barbara, and then Ann, and then, when you think about, do you think about reaching younger readers? Or do you, you know, you mentioned Instagram, obviously, which is meeting them where they are. But how do you?

• 44:30Speaker 00

  But that's not writing.

• 44:31Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. No, I know that. No, of course not. No, of course not. It's consumption. It's like eating a Twinkie sometimes. Sometimes it's good. How do you think about it? Or not at all? You're just going to write what you write and hope that people will consume it?

• 44:46Speaker 00

  I do not think about audience when I'm writing. I really don't. And I think if you want to catalog sort of the unmarketable things that I've written, you know, from post-colonial arrogance to child abuse to, what, to climate change? It's, yeah, a catalog of unmarketable things. And here we go. You know, I'm just so, I'm so appreciative and proud of readers who will tackle difficult things. And I want to say something really optimistic about the industry. I love that now, books that we call social realism are celebrated and win prizes and are considered really important, valuable books.

• 45:29Speaker 00

  I feel like if there's a genre, I've been working in my whole career, that was it. It didn't have that name when I was beginning. But for the first 10 years of my career, I'm telling you, I almost never met a journalist who didn't ask me some form of the question of, are you allowed to write about this stuff? Because, yes, yes, endlessly. Because we're supposed to be minimalist and we're supposed to write these stories that, like, you turn the page and you say, oh, that was the end. Sorry. But, you know, about domestic, oh, okay, you could write about your alcoholic father, but you could not write about the system that drove your father to drink.

• 46:13Speaker 00

  That was off the table because art doesn't go there. Now, all this time, in the rest of the world, art has been going there. And that's what people look to their artists and their poets and their painters and their muralists to interrogate the times. I cannot tell you how off the table it was. I felt like such a weirdo that I actually created a prize, the Bellwether Prize, that would, we read manuscripts from unpublished novelists and we gave them, you know, a large cash award and a publishing contract specifically to try to raise the cachet of socially engaged

• 46:54Speaker 00

  fiction, social realism, in a time when it was very difficult to break in. That has changed so much in the last 10 years.

• 47:04Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, absolutely. 100%. Men?

• 47:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think social realism is my lane. My first book was about capitalism and commerce and art. My second book is about colonialism, not the sexiest topic, and homeland. And then my third book now is about education and also the inquiry of wisdom.

• 47:26Speaker 05

  And I'm writing about economics. It's all there. And I want to write about it. As for my readers, I actually do think about my reader. I don't think about marketability, which I think is a different thing. Because readers write to me every day.

• 47:40Kara Swisher?

  Yes, it is.

• 47:41Speaker 05

  I get beautiful letters from all different kinds of readers. And they're from all over the world. And they say the most important things to me, which is, I started reading again. Like, to me, like, the highest compliment is if you tell me, I started reading again. And then the second thing is when they tell me they connected with members of their family. When children write to me and say, your book was assigned to me in college under a history class, or a political science class, or a psychology class. Like, my first book is taught in a psychology class at Columbia. And they write to me and say, oh, you know, I called my mother. I called my father. I called my grandmother. And I got answers to questions I didn't know I could ask. And then I kind of think, oh, then maybe all this suffering.

• 48:26Speaker 05

  Because I feel like my career has been mostly suffering. It's worth it. It's worth spending this kind of energy to have craft plus information.

• 48:35Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, especially from, yeah, I do, I listen to audience, but maybe not guided by it, right?

• 48:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, and, well, it's a, it's a very different thing to say you're, you have an awareness of audience when you're writing, because obviously, if you didn't have a sense of someone on the other side reading this, you would just, you would just not work very hard at it, or whatever. You would write bad, uh, bad prose. So, obviously, I, you know, I, I just try to be my own harshest critic and, um, and, and work hard for, you know, because so much of it is the craft. We talk, in these talks, we end up talking about, um, uh, larger meaning. But in the day to day, it's all just putting sentences together and then going back and revising every single one. So that's really the way in which, you know, I think all of us are really very aware of

• 49:25Speaker 00

  audience. And to talk about, um, audience awareness versus marketability are two, two different things. Thanks for, for making that a clear distinction.

• 49:36Kara Swisher?

  100%. And, Anne?

• 49:38Speaker 04

  Uh, I will say that when Barbara came, uh, someone that I know a little bit leaned on me hard to get tickets to her event that was long sold out, because her 11th grade daughter was obsessed with Poisonwood Bible, a book written long before she was born. And she just wanted to be in the room. And where men is concerned, on the floor all day long for years. We have all been selling Pachinko. And there is, the kids love Pachinko. And, and the grownups, yes, but high school kids, college kids, young people, a badge

• 50:23Speaker 04

  of honor. That is their Anna Karenina. That's their great big Russian novel. And they love it. So I think there's a lot of, a lot of safety in real time. And as far as I'm concerned, I write picture books. Because I believe that if you want readers, you should grow them yourself.

• 50:44Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 50:54Kara Swisher?

  I'm Kara Swisher, and I like people who say the quiet part out loud. In fact, I love it. That's Tiger Sisters, a new podcast that recently joined the Vox Media Podcast Network. Cherie Brook-Lu and Jean Lu are real sisters who built their careers at LinkedIn and Goldman Sachs. On their weekly podcast, they're giving the next generation practical tips on how to get ahead, how to write emails people actually answer, how to make your LinkedIn profile stand out, and how to keep learning as an adult. It's straight talk about money, career, and relationships every Monday. Follow Tiger Sisters wherever you get your podcasts.

• 51:31Speaker 02

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• 52:00Speaker 02

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• 52:13Kara Swisher?

  We're gonna get to questions you're gonna ask each other in a second. But I have one question, the inevitable AI question. Sorry, gotta do it. But I got someone good to ask the question. Every episode, we get an app site expert. Here's yours. Hi, I'm Becca Rothfeld. I'm a staff writer at The New Yorker, where I wrote mostly about books, and a little bit about culture, sometimes about film. Um, and before that, I was the nonfiction book critic at The Washington Post, before Bezos did away with the entirety of the paper's book section. Um, and the big question that I would ask is how you think AI is going to affect both the publishing industry and the quality of writing itself? Do you think that the fact that there can be text that is generated by a machine rather

• 52:58Kara Swisher?

  than a human being will change the way that people are writing? Um, is there going to be incentive for people to sort of distinguish themselves from machines by writing in more distinctive ways? Um, this is something I've been thinking about a lot, and I would love to know what you guys think. Anne, we'll start with you.

• 53:14Speaker 04

  Me?

• 53:15Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 53:17Speaker 04

  Um, oh, God. You know, I, I simply have no idea. I am not worried that in my lifetime, I'm 62.

• 53:29Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 53:30Speaker 04

  Uh, that people are, the AI is gonna come out with a Min Jin Lee novel, a Barbara Kingsolver novel, an Anne Patchett novel. It may come out with a, a romance. That's possible. I, I don't think that it's going to get to what we're doing. Interestingly, though, I live in Nashville, so I see this question much more in terms of songwriters. Because you can't really put 10 songs in and say, give me three minutes of Mary Chapin Carpenter. Yeah.

• 54:06Kara Swisher?

  Right. And then?

• 54:07Speaker 05

  Well, I want to just start with the original sin of AI, which is it's based on stolen goods.

• 54:12Kara Swisher?

  Yep.

• 54:12Speaker 05

  Nobody wants to talk about it, but it's based on stolen goods, so fix that.

• 54:17Speaker 00

  Stolen from us, by the way.

• 54:19Speaker 05

  Stolen from us, stolen from musicians, translators, you absolutely journalists. And that is something that we all need to recognize if you decide to use these devices. And obviously, people are using them. That's one. The second thing is, there are times, I'm not against science. I actually think technology is great. It's very useful. I really believe in medical science. It really useful, saved my life.

• 54:40Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, and electricity's worked out for all of us.

• 54:42Speaker 05

  Electricity is good.

• 54:44Speaker 05

  Yes, indoor heating is good. So, and plumbing, please, God. Because I, I remember growing up when we didn't have that in Korea. So, that said, I do think there are times when we have to prioritize the use of AI. And the fact that we are willing to dry up lake beds and underground water in order to have this thing, to use it for the most ridiculous reasons.

• 55:09Kara Swisher?

  Yes.

• 55:09Speaker 05

  So I have a problem with that. The other problem I have with that is making AI default search engine. Very problematic, because we are actually witnessing hallucinations in real time. Young people, adults cannot tell the difference between what is true versus what is verifiable. The fourth thing-

• 55:25Kara Swisher?

  And where did it come from? You're talking about Providence. Yeah.

• 55:28Speaker 05

  Absolutely. Thank you. And the fourth thing is to answer this young person's question. The cognitive surrender and the costs to your brain of consistently using AI has been absolutely tested at this point. And the fact that we, as a society in America, because it's not everywhere, other countries regulate the use for young people using AI, is so dramatic that we have made beta testers of children for the benefit of tech platforms is beyond preposterous. So this pretext of having an arms race against China, and that's the reason why we have to continue to do this. Is a lie. What we're really talking about is a stock market that's artificially inflated by AI stocks and how we don't want to lose that.

• 56:13Speaker 05

  And we're not being honest about it. So for me, to answer her question and also to give my little rant about AI, because I'm not against AI.

• 56:20Kara Swisher?

  I love it. It sounds like an episode of Pivot on any given Tuesday, but go ahead.

• 56:25Speaker 05

  By the way, I'm a huge fan of Pivot. But going back to answer the question, I think that Anne is right. They're not going to create our books. However, I do think that we are going to damage young people's brains. And that, all the neuroscientists have confirmed. So the quality of the work, I don't know. None of us really know. Because how can you have symphonies and novels and great plays without having a brain that should ideally work in an optimum setting?

• 56:56Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, the creativity element. Barbara?

• 56:58Speaker 00

  The immorality of this industry built on stolen goods, the immorality of damaging children's brain development, which it's so important to notice that this is unique to us. Other countries are working really hard to limit the damage to children, to their education and their brain development. So I'm also, I'll add another moral section to this rant, which is the way that it's taking jobs from the information economy, mostly young women's jobs, is harrowing. Entry-level positions involve doing the stuff that AI does really well, you know, reading and summarizing information.

• 57:38Speaker 00

  And that's scary because you're drying up the pipeline, changing the structure of a lot of industries. And I will say, to be proud of the film industry, which is weirdly the most unionized industry in this country, the screenwriters, we, screenwriters, went out on a long strike to stop the industry from having AI produce virtually all their first drafts, which then they turn over to humans to make into actually interesting movies. But that's where about, because it's a standard contract for screenwriters and like 70 to 80% of the money is in the first drafts. So they were stealing that money and that pipeline. So it's really, oh, quite villainous.

• 58:23Speaker 00

  As far as what it will do to literary fiction, that's not my worry. I think AI is so stumped by poetry. It's just kind of fun to watch. I saw on Instagram, there was one of my poems, and there was all this argument in the comments because they were saying, well, AI said it means this, and AI said that means the exact opposite, and what are we going to do? And I just chuckled. It's poetry. All of us here write poetry, just in different forms. We think a lot about language and, you know, writing sentences that have never been written before, that kind of light up a reader's brain with that, oh, wow, never thought about those words in connection before.

• 59:05Speaker 00

  So we are up on a mountain and the tsunami of AI is going to reach us last, I will say. So selfishly, I'm not worried, but I'm really worried about the world.

• 59:17Kara Swisher?

  It is. It is stumped by creativity. It is. It still remains that. And I keep saying that it's just talking to ourselves. I was talking to someone and they said, well, it's going to create new things. I go, but it's based on our stuff. Like, it can only repeat and reorganize what we've already done. Anyway, speaking of that, it's not every day we get such an acclaimed author in conversations with others like this. So we asked each of you to come up with a question for the other two. Barbara, you start.

• 59:42Speaker 00

  Well, I have different questions because you're such different writers. Min, this is about research, because I love a good immersive historical novel. And also, having written historical novels before, I know how much work goes into investigating. It's different. It's one thing to research a place that you can go, but to go back to a place in time that you cannot visit. I'm curious as to whether you have specific research or favorite research tools for getting

• 1:00:23Speaker 00

  into a place in time that you can't have direct access to, or even maybe more importantly, a cultural mindset of a time, a zeitgeist? Because it's so easy to project backward and to think that the way we all think now is the same way.

• 1:00:43Kara Swisher?

  Sure. Great question.

• 1:00:44Speaker 00

  So, research tools.

• 1:00:46Speaker 05

  I love this question so much because one of the fields of discipline, academic disciplines that I admire the most is anthropology. And I love the way ethnographers work. And I love their participant observations, where they're kind of in it, but they can't. And you're talking about a time machine situation. So two things is, one, I actually go to archives. Archives are very helpful, but then when it's archives about people who are poor or illiterate, you don't get any information, as you know. So the thing that I've really done is, I have, and I think this is really a luxury, is that I really can find people to talk to who are descendants of those people. I have found many, many people, and that's my field work. I'll go to the place where they were, but I will listen for a long time to many, many

• 1:01:31Speaker 05

  different kinds of people whose ancestors were illiterate. And it's very important because in Korea, women were mostly illiterate only about 100 years ago. It's only 100 years. So if you meet a Korean person, they say, my grandmother was this, my great-grandmother was that, chances are that person was very connected to power or to Christianity, because missionaries took some time to educate girls. So I really listen mostly to people who are ancestors. And if I can't get that, it's very hard for me because I'm going to just say, sometimes when you listen to minorities within certain communities, we don't realize how much they have internalized the majority's point of view. So it's not fashionable today to say those things.

• 1:02:14Speaker 05

  But if you're in a oppressed minority of whatever time, wherever space, in that time in which you were before, very often, you actually believe the shit people said about you. And that was very shocking to me, that a person could hate themselves so much or think that they didn't have a chance, and how the mind gets corrupted by systems of hatred.

• 1:02:36Kara Swisher?

  Excellent answer. Barbara asked your question for Anne.

• 1:02:39Speaker 00

  Okay, well, this is an extension of a conversation that we had, whenever it was, when we were at your dining table, and we were talking about how we use feedback. And it sounds like you do a lot of writing before you show your manuscript to anybody. And I was wondering how you, I always, one of the things I get, that I really like to get from immediate feedback, is like, how you walk that line between what's obvious to, being too obvious or too cryptic? Because, you know, when I write something, it's also clear to me. So I tend to err on the side of less obvious. And it's up to my reader to say, mm, turn up the lights here.

• 1:03:23Speaker 00

  I don't quite see what's going on. But that line between telling too much and telling too little, I'm curious how you manage that.

• 1:03:31Speaker 04

  I rely on my own internal compass. And I can remember one time, a very, very close friend and trusted reader gave me advice about the end of State of Wonder. She said, oh, it's way too obvious. And I dialed it down, and no one knew what happened at the end of that book. And I always look back on that and thought, what I did was, I trusted a voice that was not my own. So, rise or fall, I do it on my own wave.

• 1:04:09Kara Swisher?

  That's a nice way of saying, she'll do it as she damn well pleases. And I'm there for it.

• 1:04:13Speaker 00

  Clearly it's working.

• 1:04:14Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, that's how I am. Someone was telling me about something I just had a big success on with this Hillary Clinton podcast, and they were like, I don't think you should do it. I'm like, I don't really care what you think.

• 1:04:25Kara Swisher?

  Good for me. And then, of course, she's rising and the things. Min, you go next.

• 1:04:29Speaker 05

  The question that I had for both the writers is kind of a weird one. But I'm asking out of, for personal reasons. Did you ever think about quitting writing? And if you decided not to, what made you stay?

• 1:04:45Kara Swisher?

  She's asking for a friend.

• 1:04:47Speaker 05

  I'm asking for a friend.

• 1:04:48Speaker 00

  No, no. I did once. Once, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, as we call them now, I wrote a whole bunch of op-ed pieces that were kind of published in papers all over the country about how this is a moment we could seize as Americans to think about who we want to be in the world, to think about not answering fundamentalism with fundamentalism, sort of a call to, you know, rise to the occasion. That was not what the occasion wanted. And I got death threat after death threat, people sending my books back to me as if

• 1:05:29Speaker 00

  they all actually emanated originally from my home. Lots of, you know, offers to say, you know, buy me a one-way ticket out of the country. I got so much hate. But it was harrowing, and I was terrified for my children because there were threats against my, I had little kids at the time. And I thought, I have misjudged. And the weird part is that if any of those had been published one year later, it would have been received differently. So I realized I had so profoundly misjudged what needed to be said in that moment and had the potential to cause so much harm to my family, that I told my agent, I'm done.

• 1:06:13Speaker 00

  I am never going to write again. And it was a dark winter, scary, dark winter. I mean, I can't tell you how we had to be so careful with anything that came to the house. And she called me, she was like my mother. She was a mother to me. She was my adoptive mother. She called me every single day and told me another story about how somebody, somewhere, had read something I'd written, and it helped them get through the day because they believed this, they thought the same thing, but either had no platform to say it, or had no, it was too risky for them to say it. Every day of the winter, she said, you took the risk for other people.

• 1:06:56Kara Swisher?

  That's right.

• 1:06:57Speaker 00

  And you can't quit.

• 1:06:58Kara Swisher?

  So that brought you back to writing.

• 1:06:59Speaker 00

  You don't get to quit. And that was it. Never, I've not looked back since then.

• 1:07:03Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, good for you. Anne, you said no, why?

• 1:07:06Speaker 05

  Oh, I don't know how to do anything else.

• 1:07:10Speaker 04

  That's why.

• 1:07:11Kara Swisher?

  Not plumbing, not?

• 1:07:12Speaker 04

  No, no, this is it. This is, I mean, when I was five, if you had said, what are you gonna do when you grow up? I would have said, I'm gonna be a writer. And I just never changed my tune.

• 1:07:22Kara Swisher?

  Yep. Well, excellent then. And you finish up.

• 1:07:25Speaker 04

  Okay, so Barbara, sex, sex, Barbara.

• 1:07:27Kara Swisher?

  Excellent.

• 1:07:28Speaker 04

  You write great sex. And I feel like there was a time, Updike, Bellow, Roth, when literary fiction had a lot of sex, good sex, bad sex. And now we don't have sex in literary fiction, but you're having sex in literary fiction.

• 1:07:50Speaker 00

  Well, it's, it's like, in real life, I write about real life, and there's a lot of sex going on, surely, I hope. And I almost never read about it. And it's interesting, your point, Anne, is so interesting, because I remember in the, you're right, I remember reading Norman Mailer and those guys, and for that matter, Lady Chatterley's lover, and thinking, okay, this is their side of the story, but this is not what it's like for me. You know, it was all very, it was very, sort of, that was masculine. And so I thought, well, I'm gonna, I'm not gonna shrink from this. It's important, if I'm

• 1:08:32Speaker 00

  gonna write about real stuff, to include this. But it's also difficult, because the language, mainly because the language has been appropriated by, well, pornography or your doctor. And so, it's a place where you have to be incredibly creative with your language, with scenarios, you know, to sort of create ways to make it interesting and memorable, and, and, you know, not rely on, sort of, genitalia. You know, the things that you, that everybody already knows are happening, you can imply, but you really have to get the reader, you know, into the place. So it's nice and steamy. And I really like doing that.

• 1:09:13Speaker 04

  I'll never look at a piano bench the same way.

• 1:09:18Speaker 04

  Just, just saying. Okay, Min, The Marshall Plan. You have written three glorious, long books that I have loved, that took you a long time. And now, every time I'm reading an interview with you right now, you're talking about the fourth one. And it kind of makes my heart stop, because I think, you know, what are we talking, seven years, 10 years? How can you be so publicly committed to an idea for a novel that we're not gonna get our mitts on for a long time?

• 1:09:57Kara Swisher?

  Plus the Marshall Plan part of it.

• 1:09:58Speaker 04

  Plus the Marshall Plan. I love you for that. And I, it's like, I want to read you writing about the Marshall Plan tomorrow. Am I supposed to stay in that place for eight years?

• 1:10:11Speaker 05

  Oh, Anne, you're an angel. You're a genius and an angel. So, which is hard, hard. Very few angels are geniuses, but Anne Patchett is one of those. So my fourth novel is Marshall Plan. It's gonna take a while, because it's really hard. Marshall Plan, as we know, The Marshall Plan, is, I think, one of the greatest things America has ever done. I believed this for a long time. I used to be a history major in college. And it's so important that we take devastation and ruin and respond in generosity, because it's actually a mutually beneficial goal. History has actually proven this, lots and lots of evidence that The Marshall Plan was a good one. And right now, we're in an era in which we're really turning away from this idea. We are going to eliminate, exclude,

• 1:10:56Speaker 05

  and punish, and be self-righteous. So I wanted to write my fourth and final novel. I'm 58 years old in November. I might be 68 when I, when the book comes out. And then I have another book that's due afterward, a memoir. If I could round out this quartet, I wanted to write about the idea of remittances. So you had South Koreans who went to Germany under a treaty in the 60s, where people, 20,000 people, actually, went to work in West Germany in the lowest possible jobs. And that money was sent back to South Korea to build a very, very poor country. So I'm writing about them. But I'm also writing about people who went from South Korea, who are a little bit better off. And they went to Europe to learn how to become artists, opera singers.

• 1:11:41Speaker 05

  Pianists, violin players. And then, I'm also writing about women who are South Korean, who married military men, American military, GIs. And all these groups of people in the diaspora sent money back to South Korea and rebuilt it. They have not received their due. So I want to write about remittances, and I want to write about reconstruction. What is the role of the immigrant and the migrant, and people who feel displaced, in which they connect to their home country? So, but above all, I want to write about generosity.

• 1:12:12Speaker 04

  I just want to say, that is amazing. And you didn't answer the question.

• 1:12:17Speaker 05

  I didn't.

• 1:12:17Kara Swisher?

  She says go faster.

• 1:12:19Speaker 04

  Because the question is, like, what if you change your mind?

• 1:12:24Speaker 05

  I've never changed my mind. I've never done that. I've actually never.

• 1:12:28Speaker 04

  That's what I want to know.

• 1:12:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, I finish what I start. And I have, I have depression, OCD, and I also have anxiety, clinically diagnosed. And the one thing that I know about me is that when I lock in an idea, I am very, very, like, neurodivergent in a good way. I will finish it. As long as I have health, I will finish this book, and I will not change my mind. I never have. And that's how my career has worked out.

• 1:12:56Speaker 04

  That's what I wanted to know.

• 1:12:58Kara Swisher?

  That is that. Also, if you say it out, if you say it out loud, you can't take it back, right?

• 1:13:02Speaker 05

  There you go, yes.

• 1:13:04Kara Swisher?

  I do that all the time. I say things publicly, so I won't go back, which is the next way. I think she's gonna do it, and you're gonna have to wait.

• 1:13:10Speaker 04

  I do, too.

• 1:13:11Kara Swisher?

  Anne, you're gonna have to wait.

• 1:13:12Speaker 00

  I know she's gonna do it.

• 1:13:12Kara Swisher?

  All right, last, very last question. I know I've kept you here a long time. Very briefly, what advice do you have for the next generation of novelists? Just one single piece of advice that each of you give. Barbara, then Min, then Anne, you finish it out.

• 1:13:25Speaker 00

  Just read. Just read. Read, read. Read books that you wish you had written yourself. That's, and read diversely, read, read sort of beyond your comfort zone, to expand your, your understanding of what a writer can be.

• 1:13:43Kara Swisher?

  Excellent. Min?

• 1:13:44Speaker 05

  So I'm gonna quote the great Grace Paley. And Grace Paley said, keep a low overhead. If you want to be a writer, keep a low overhead. And you know what? I think that's really smart, because then you're not going to be committed into things that you can't do. Very often, I hear over and over again, oh, it's money, and that's the reason why I can't follow my dreams. So I'm kind of thinking, keep a low overhead. It'll really help you.

• 1:14:06Kara Swisher?

  Excellent. And financially sound, by the way.

• 1:14:08Speaker 04

  Grace was my teacher, and used to say that all the time when I was in college. And I live by it and swear by it. And I will put next to that, low expectations are the secret of happiness. And if you write because you love to write, because you cannot imagine processing the world any other way, that's what a life as a writer is. What happens to it later, not your job, not your business, not your concern. What matters is that you make the art and you're true to yourself.

• 1:14:41Kara Swisher?

  Excellent advice, all of you. I think this is amazing. This has been an amazing interview. And I'm so glad I did it right now. I feel good about myself.

• 1:14:49Speaker 04

  Well, you should, God.

• 1:14:51Kara Swisher?

  I'm always trying to do different things. I really appreciate it. You're all wonderful writers, and have contributed so much, and deserve all the accolades you get. But this has been a wonderful conversation.

• 1:15:01Speaker 04

  It's been so nice hanging out with the three of you.

• 1:15:04Kara Swisher?

  Thanks.

• 1:15:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've enjoyed it so much.

• 1:15:07Speaker 05

  No, I feel so lucky. I feel so lucky.

• 1:15:10Kara Swisher?

  Today's show was produced by Vicky Vergolina, Michelle Alloy, Catherine Millsop, Madeleine LePlante-Duby, and Megan Burney. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Catherine Barner, Jim Mackel, and Manolo Moreno. This episode was engineered by Aliyah Jackson Perez. And our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following this show, art is making your life better. If not, Min's gonna yell at you about using AI, and you deserve it. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.