But of course, uh, it would seem that, that, that, that is a part of the impetus and the reason that we have Retro, right?

Yeah.

So in the fall of 2021, I took this online novel cla- like, a fiction class through Catapult, which doesn't do classes anymore, which is really sad, but the teacher, Moriel Rothman-Zecher, is this phenomenal writer, and he still teaches courses elsewhere.

And the class was titled, it was, like, A Cold-Hearted Work Plan for Finishing Your Novel, and this was a very dress for the job you want situation.

I had written, like, 15 pages of Retro, but I just believed.

You know, I just had that feeling that you sometimes have when you meet someone and you know you're gonna be friends, or you're on the first date and you're like, "I'm gonna be in love with this person." Like, I just knew that this was the idea that was going to go the distance.

And I took that class, and I think a lot of the emotions of pandemic life, which for me, I know for a lot of people it was, like, intense nostalgia.

So yeah, just tell us a little bit about this.

Are you saying that that went away, or was that always there in some way, shape, or form?

form?So I think there was this cultural moment, let's say between 2000, 2010, you get the rise of all of these laws restricting smoking in the United States.

We get these very effective anti-smoking campaigns from, like, the Truth organization, and smoking becomes sort of a signifier, yes, of being bad, but also of being, like, a bit of a burnout.

It's not necessarily perceived as bad in a cool way.

But I think a few things happened that have brought cigarettes kind of back into favor, and I should add that cigarettes are back in, like, a cultural cachet way.

They're not actually back in a quantitative way.

Nicotine use is up.

Really, what's been the reaction since the article came out, Jessica?

My dream.

Yes.

There are all these perks and things that make you feel like this is the dreamiest place on earth, and at the same time, the whole operation is run by this very strange, very charismatic tech billionaire named Roe Temple, who is the guy who invented this time machine and is adamant that the timeline is resilient, and that's why these trips are safe and why it's totally fine for them to do whatever they want to do in the past because he believes that no matter what they do, they will never alter the course of history, and there's nothing to worry about.

So she's in this place where, like, who wants to have to worry about anything? She's kinda having the time of her life, but at the same time, there's always this feeling of, like, what's really going on here? What's really happening at Retro? I would also say that- This is, uh, this is a book about relationships.

It's about office relationships, workplace relationships.

It's also about romantic relationships, the projections that we have on our crushes, on people we date as we're still getting to know them, and it's about how a friendship can be the great love of your life, and it can be the thing that really keeps you in it.

And when I think about the real emotion of this book, which is how hard it is to stay hopeful about the future and how tempting it is to give into despair, and when I think about what keeps me in it, it is always coming back to, like, well, if my friends are gonna be there, the future is a place worth going.

[laughs]

You didn't

realize? She twisted a long, dark coil of her hair around her finger so tightly her knuckles turned white.

That is so typical.

This is why you can't plan our vacations.

This is just like that time at Machu Picchu when you thought we could do the Inca Trail without a Sherpa.

Babe, it's just going uphill.

Like, yeah, I know it's a very big hill.

And if you were in person, you're like in a heartbeat, we'd be right back there.

I wanna hear from you about why you chose the specific places that you did and how important to the whole book undisturbed nature pre-development is.

So I spent a lot of time just making lists of where Retro would go, and some of it was like, okay, what are the tourist traps? What is like the Times Square equivalent of time travel? And I knew that there would be a difference between where Retro took guests, who would go to the most like obvious mainstream stuff, and where the staff would go when they could travel without guests, because if you work at Retro, you can travel for free and you can go whenever you want as long as you like don't miss meetings.

You can like go to the '90s for lunch.

You can go to the 1800s on a Saturday night.

Like, you can do whatever you want, essentially.

And then I spent time thinking about, okay, all of these characters that I have, what are they nostalgic for? And the character in the book who runs the conveyance department, which is the engineering research and development department, his name is Wyatt, and he's really young, and he's one of these like wunderkinds who got hired like right out of school, super smart, genius, and he works all the time, so he's never outside.

And so when he does get a break, I thought like, "Oh, this is somebody who whenever he actually has an opportunity to be out of the office, he wants to be experiencing nature in a way that is completely inaccessible to him in modern life." And one of his favorite places to go is a place that I found out about from this great Boston Public Radio series on how Logan Airport basically destroyed this East Boston neighborhood, this area called Wood Island Park, which was this absolutely massive, gorgeous, splendid area of like baseball diamonds and public land.

She has no want for the future, right? But then, um, something happens to change that, and I was wondering if you could describe it.

you were gonna get there and i'm sure it was pinging all around in your head and you're thinking okay i'm gonna try this oh wait this wouldn't work because of that i mean it would just be one of those things that would take a while to even come up with what concept you wanted to use

so much thought and so much like okay what is the what is the function of this particular mechanism by which they get to the past because there are some time travel stories where it really doesn't matter how you get there it just matters that you get there But I knew that this was a story about travel and that the experience of getting from point A to point B was going to be central to the story.

And I thought a lot about other stories that I've loved that have these kind of mystical means of transit that have one foot in reality and one foot in what's impossible, whether that's the DeLorean from Back to the Future.

I thought a lot about the Phantom Tollbooth, which I love, one of my all time favorites.

I thought about that great Pixar movie, Coco, and how there's like a TSA customs thing to get to the afterlife.

And it's like, oh, this is familiar, but it's strange.

So I knew I wanted it to exist in that in-between place.

And before we wrap up, I would love to know what you've read recently that you really liked.

Where did this all come from? Are you a time travel fan, or how did you stumble across this idea?

So I first, I started out just with the wordplay of time travel agency.

I just thought that was so funny and so evocative.

I was really thinking about work and workplaces.

I've worked in a couple really interesting offices.

I started out as a journalist at the Washington Post, like the old Don Graham's Washington Post, and that was just a wild, intense ecosystem of which to be a part as a very young person.

And I really wanted to write about work and how weird work is, and the thought of combining the structure of an office with the zany impossibility of time travel was very appealing to me.

When you started writing the book, how, how did you write? Did you know where you wanted to go? Did you just start writing and let the sort of characters take on their own world? How did you, how did you write this?