How did you, was that important to you to write romance that did feel like part of a big love story, even though you knew probably these characters weren't going to end up together? Because I think that's important.

It was really important to me that like, for at least the first half of this book, there's like an unironic.

I mean, I say, you know, I mean, there's plenty of irony in the way they talk to each other, but like, I think there's, I think that's like the thing that really made me believe in this book was it's like the kind of friction between the two characters is like, I don't know.

I think that's something we look for in our relationships and like the way they speak to each other and they kind of get something from each other that I don't think There's this transactional element where he's this older guy who has a stable life.

She doesn't have a stable life.

She's this younger woman who is exciting in her own way and is new to things, and that's quite intoxicating for him.

You can boil it down to that formula, but I think there's something inexplicable.

Tell me about your decision to do that and what you feel you got back from it.

Mm

...

I'm, I'm fairly private.

I think if you- I think people kind of know that about me.

So I th- I honestly, that probably is the resistance with memoir is I just don't like to give too much of myself away.

I've kind of always been like that.

Auto-fiction I, I really like and really admire.

Yeah

Hmm.

So what I would do is I paid really close attention to kind of how he would live his life and what he would do.

And I was always trying to kind of describe that in like kind of the funniest way I could, honestly.

And then like very occasionally there'll be these kind of bursts of, you know, memory or like he... you know, reads an email from, or, you know, a message from someone from his past, you know, so I was always really conscious that he lived mostly in his head, but actually he still lives in the physical world.

And I needed to address the way he lives in the physical world because that, that to me, it's also just more fun to describe.

And I, I kind of think more fun to read.

And I knew I was going to have to use, I was going to have to illuminate his thought processes very carefully and, And so I tried to keep it...

How did you find writing about writers? And what maybe do you think it means separately to Joey and to Chuck?

how do you know those are going to have the volume?

Yeah.

I suppose I just try really to see, to just think as hard as I can about things that occur every day in my own life.

The things that I'm sort of like trying not to notice and looking away from, because I always assume that other writers are probably doing the same.

And I just think it's always, I'm just always trying to innovate on some level and, And actually the irony is I'm not really trying to innovate on a formal level.

I really love the novel.

I really love the literary novel.

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