um so i just wondered when you're when you're dealing with a story like that when you're dealing with a story like understory do you do you sit down beforehand do you outline do you plan or do you try and do you have the idea do you have the concept and try and hold it in your head and and then and just see where the writing takes you

So, yes, they do have that similarity.

And I think I did it much better in Understory.

I think that, you know, Anatomy of Dreams was I was really young when I wrote it.

I started that in graduate school after that first submission.

So I was like probably 22.

2 23 24 and so um i i think i'm hard on that book and um you know i'll whenever like very occasionally i'll hear somebody say like oh that that's actually my i prefer that book and i'm always like touched i'm like really um but you're but it does have some similarities with with understory and um To get back to your question about sort of where things begin, I tend to have quite a long brainstorming process before I start working.

I'm just wondering what the process, you know, what is the process from the point of view of your agent or editor or something like that? Are you checking in with them every month or something like that just to let them know how it's going? Yeah.

Sorry, just understory.

That's okay.

Absolutely.

I would love to.

This will be the first two pages, and the chapter is called Terra Australis.

The descent into Antarctica takes Laurel by surprise.

There are no windows on the plane, so she can't see the ice rise to meet her.

So what kind of challenges did that present to you as a writer?

So what was the initial inspiration for Understory?

So in 2020, news came out that a neutrino experiment in Antarctica called ANITA was producing results that were very strange.

And I talk about this in the book.

That is the feed that was pulled from real life.

When those results came out, what they noticed was that neutrinos, which are an elementary particle, were strange.

essentially exhibiting inverted properties.

They were moving in the opposite direction to what was expected.

So fun and different.

we don't know what's going to, we hate

it.

We don't know what's going to happen in our lives and, or happen to the people that we love.

And like, that's such a wild thing to have to try to find acceptance around.

And so I think I have a lot of fear and worry about like bad things happening.

But I also recognize that sometimes those are the very things that wind up changing your life for the better.

It's like you couldn't be where you are now if you weren't where you were then.

It's something that, you know, I've struggled with anxiety for many years now and I... frequently think of worst case scenarios and I wonder if there's something you know in the fact that you've faced something you fear so head-on by writing this book you know you've faced the the many ways the many things that life that can happen in life and you know you face death and like the life cycle you know you've you've faced all of that head-on and I wondered if it's if this book has changed your kind of perspective on life is that a very big question I

did you learn to write like that?

Oh, my gosh.

Well, thank you.

That's an honor.

And I'm so grateful that the sentence landed with you that way and that the language did in general work.

I am a voracious reader like every writer, I think.

And I love language.

And I was wondering how your own understanding of time, fate, and agency has changed between those two books or either between them or after writing both of them.

And I wonder which one caught your mind first.

Yes.

So this book was a long writing process.

It's the longest I've ever taken on a book.

It was about five years just for the first draft.

And I think in that time, there was so much layering and simmering.

It's kind of like making a stew where the ingredients meld and different ideas can come up in the course of that long incubation process.

I was hoping you could talk a little bit about the people you talked to and sort of the journey you went on to sort of understanding the world you were building.

So what has that been like?

Yeah, Immortalist was my second novel.

And my first novel had been what we call in the industry a quiet publication, which means it didn't sell many copies.

And nobody was really waiting for the second one.

And Immortalist came out and this magical thing happened where it became a New York Times bestseller.

And I found an audience.

And I was touring for almost a year and a half.

does Chloe navigate that?

Like I kept thinking if you were just brainstorming ideas down to tech, right? Yeah, like the eye cane.

I feel really proud of the eye cane.

Yeah.

So, you know, for the spoilery part of the episode that, you know, in the anti-universe, people are born in old age and then they age down to youth.

So essentially when they're in their, you know, 60s, 70s, 80s, depending on when somebody is born, they're effectively teenage.

They've had a teenage number of years on Earth.

So Apple comes out with these... devices like the eye cane that, you know, come in like these different like rose hold and stuff like that.

And I don't know if that's even what you intended, but that's what I took from it.

Do you have a science background? How did you research for this novel?

I don't have a science background, but I think I'm interested in science from a philosophical perspective.

It's a way of trying to answer big, fascinating questions.

I interviewed physicists.

I followed mycologists, so fungi researchers working in caves.

I attended a women's mushroom conference.

I interviewed clockmakers.

While I was writing the book, I was experiencing

Talk a little bit about this concept of the understory.

Yeah, there's a lot going on.

I first got the idea for this book in 2020 when I heard about some real life results coming out of an experiment in Antarctica called ANITA.

That experiment was finding that neutrinos, an elementary particle, were moving in the opposite direction as what they expected.

The scientific community threw out all kinds of ideas, and one rather fringe idea was that perhaps these results were evidence of a model, an experimental, unproven model called a CPT-symmetric universe.

And in that model, there was one Big Bang that produced two universes, ours where time moved forward, and a second universe where time moved backward.

And that was soon disproven as the reasoning behind the ANITA results, but it was totally fascinating for me.

Tell us a little more about how you let Wisconsin inspire you.