Joseph Plateau Awards 2004

Transcription

KAREN: Hi everyone. Thanks for coming. I'm here to welcome Ellen Sussman, local author. Ellen is the author of the nationally best-selling novels "French Lessons" and "On a Night Like This." She's the editor of two anthologies, "Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave," a "New York Times" editor's choice and "San Francisco Chronicle" best-seller; and "Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex." She has published numerous essays and short stories. Ellen teaches creative writing both in private classes and through Stanford Continuing Studies. She has two daughters, and lives with her husband in northern California. ELLEN SUSSMAN: Thank you, Karen, for inviting me here, and introducing me. And thank you guys all for coming, and whoever else is out there listening in for listening in today. I'm really pleased to be here. It's also my first visit to the Google Campus, so I was wowed. It's been-- and lunch was really yummy. So today I'm going to talk about my latest novel, which just came out at the end of March. So kind of hot off the shelves. And it's called, "The Paradise Guest House." And I think that what I will do first is tell you how this novel came to be. It's very different from my other novels. And then, I'll read a little bit from it, and then it's up to you guys, because I would love your questions. That's always, to me, the most interesting part of these discussions, because it tends to make it more new for me. And we can go in all kinds of different directions. But I'll start with where the idea came from. Do you all remember the terrorist attacks in Bali in 2002? Yes? I'm getting mixed responses to that when I've-- I've just finished a book tour. And I remember it as such a big deal. And I think a lot of people kind of missed it. It might be that it was a year after 9/11, and we were still absorbed with our own healing. But it was an absolutely horrific terrorist attack. Bombs were set off at two nightclubs in Bali, killing over 200 young people-- as in 20-somethings-- mostly Westerners. A great majority were Australian kids. And it devastated Bali, as you can imagine. Anyone here been to Bali? So I had always wanted to go to Bali. And after those terrorist attacks, that went on the back burner. I wasn't going to go for a while. And a few years went past, and my husband and I started talking about let's go back, let's plan that trip. His father had been to Bali years before, and talked about it as paradise, which we've always heard Bali as talked about a kind of paradise. So we-- in 2005, we planned a trip. And three weeks before we were set to leave, there was a second set of terrorist attacks. And these were smaller. They only-- only-- 20 people were killed. But they were set up in the same sort of way. They were at tourist restaurants and cafes. And they had the same sort of effect, which was to send to the tourist industry-- to destroy the tourist industry, and to crush the Balinese people in substantial ways. Neal and I decided not to cancel that trip, and I'm not quite sure why. But we felt very strongly that we should go. And when we went, our experience in Bali was so unusual, we did not see one tourist in two weeks. Not one Westerner. So hotels were completely empty. Beaches were empty. Restaurants were empty. The Balinese tend to eat in different restaurants than the tourists eat in. So this fabulously gorgeous country was kind unmarred by ugly tourists. And it also gave us a wonderful chance to talk to the Balinese people. And I'm not sure we would have had that same opportunity. We got their stories on what had happened in 2002, and what happened just three weeks before, and how they were affected. And for some reason-- I've never written a novel that is based on a historical event before-- but for some reason, this kind of got under my skin, and affected me in a very profound way. And as I started to think about it, I think there are a couple of things that were going on. One is that Bali is paradise. I mean, you can't imagine a more gorgeous island. It's got those white, pristine beaches, and crystal blue waters, and lush mountains, and terraced rice paddies. It's heaven. And the idea of these terrorist attacks in paradise just didn't make sense-- not that we could make great sense out of the World Trade Centers, but at least you could kind of figure out why that would happen, right? And the other thing that made no sense to me was the Balinese people are the most peaceful, loving, religious-- their religion is Balinese Hinduism. The rest of Indonesia is Muslim, so Bali stands out as a very separate part of Indonesia, which might have had to do with the terrorist attacks. But I couldn't make a connection between the Balinese people being a target of these attacks. And as-- I have one writing student here-- as my writing students always hear me talk about, I tend to write to learn something, rather than to spout out everything I already know. So I think I wrote this book to try to understand those disconnects that didn't make sense to me. And the end of the-- I should throw in here-- one of the reasons why I think that works very well, especially for fiction, is it means that I am writing with a driving need to discover something, and that will kind of push the forward momentum of the book. I'm trying to learn something. So my reader will also have that sense of needing to discover, needing to learn. Whereas, I think if a writer knows everything about their subject, knows everything that they're going to tell in the story that they're setting forth to write, there will be a kind of dryness or a lack of energy in those pages. So I actually loved the idea that I don't understand something, and that I create a fictional world in order to understand it. So by the end of the two weeks that we were there, I had this idea that I would write about a young woman who is in Bali on business-- a young American woman-- and she gets caught in the terrorist attacks, and is injured. And a year later, she returns to Bali for a one year anniversary healing ceremony, and also she is looking for the man who saved her when she was there. And that was sort of the germ of the idea. I didn't know how I was going to go about it. I'll tell you quick side story. I called my agent at that time-- I still have the same agent-- and I told her this idea all excited. And she said, no, no, no, no, do not write that novel. I said, why not? And she said, Americans do not care about Bali. And I said, really? She said, no, you can't write about foreign countries. Americans don't care about foreign countries. So this was in 2005. Two things, I think, have changed, and changed-- I didn't come back to writing this novel till five years later. And I think two major things changed. The biggest one-- does anyone know why Bali-- "Eat, Pray, Love." So "Eat, Pray, Love" came out in 2006, proving my agent completely wrong. And suddenly, Americans are wildly interested in Bali-- so much so that when I went back-- I went back in 2010 to spend a month to do much more serious research-- and now the island is filled with tour buses of young 30-something women looking for spiritual enlightenment, or Javier Bardem. And it's kind of awful. I still love Bali, but you have to avoid the EPL syndrome, is what they call it, and how much this fairly untouched piece of paradise has been changed by tourism. And the other thing that I think did change is that I think Americans finally kind of got outside of themselves a little bit, and started to think about what's happening in other countries finally. So I had put this book on the back burner. A real quick aside-- I came up with another idea for a novel. I had lived in Paris for five years some years ago, and I had an idea for a novel. I called my agent, and I said, here's a new idea. It's three Americans in Paris on one day all each walking the streets of Paris with their own French tutor talking about love and loss and Paris, and all kinds of things. And I said, it's three novellas connected that way. And she said, no, no, no, don't write that novel. And I said, why not? And she said, I can't sell novellas. not-- will not work. So that one did not let go of me. And I just thought, until I come up with the next idea, I might as well just write this one, and ignore her, even if I'm just twiddling my thumbs and keeping myself out of trouble. So I wrote that novel, and by the time I was finished, I loved it. I was really happy with the world that I had created. And I sent it to her, and I said, here's my novel about three Americans in Paris. And I never used the word novella. She had completely forgotten the conversation that we had had. And she read it, and loved it. A writer's dream is what's called an auction. So when an agent goes out with a book, they go to many publishers. And our more realistic dream is that maybe one publisher will make a bid on your book. And with "French Lessons," nine publishers were bidding on the book, so it went to auction. And in the end, the two publishers that were still fighting for it-- a day later, I decided to sweeten the offer by making it a two-book deal. So my agent called me up, and she said, this is so exciting-- quick, do you have an idea for a second novel? And I said, yes, how about a young woman who goes to Bali and gets caught in the terrorist attack? She said, that is brilliant. No recollection. So that became part of the two-book deal, and I finally got to write my Bali novel. After I read from it, I'll tell you a little bit about the research that went into it. Again, as I said, I've never done-- written a novel that has so much research involved. But it so much depended upon what actually happened in Bali at that time, and an understanding of Balinese culture and religion, and all of those things that I knew so little about. So we'll get to that part. I'm going to read from the-- it's actually the second scene in the novel. Jamie, the young woman, has just arrived-- the first scene is she's on the plane landing in Bali with all of her fears and reservations. And in this next scene-- well, you'll see what follows. "When the taxi jolts to a stop, Jamie's eyes fly open, and for a startled second she catches a glimpse of Gabe in her dream. No, it's something more tactile than visual. His fingers drawing circles on her hip. The smell of the sea and his hair. She clears her mind with a shake. 'This is the street,' the taxi driver says, patiently waiting for her. Jamie had been wide awake at the start of the hour-long taxi ride Ubud. She watched the hordes of motorbikes fill the streets, rolling down the windows to let in thick, tropical air. And then sleep kicked in-- hours on international flights, and she couldn't doze for a minute. 10 minutes in a beaten up jalopy without air conditioning, and she was comatose. 'Lady,' the taxi driver says. He is young, and smells of ginger. On the dashboard are prayer offerings, probably to the gods of pothole roads with too many motorbikes. 'Thank you,' Jamie says, paying the man, and hauling her suitcase out of the car. She stands on the sidewalk and looks around. She hadn't visited Ubud a year ago. She'd stayed in Seminyak for the first few days, and then she spent three days in a beach cottage somewhere until she could flee the country. But Ubud is the home of Nyoman, her host for this trip down memory lane. The foundation that organized the one-year memorial event sent her a packet with his name, his address, and an itinerary of events leading up to the ceremony on Sunday. She'd also received a plane ticket-- a gift from the government of Bali. She'd been promised a new Bali. Jamie looks around. People swarmed the streets, and she feels the immediate exhilaration that always marks her first day in a new country. But it's mixed with something else, something that chills her skin despite the damp heat. I can do this, she tells herself, in the same way she has argued with her mother for weeks. I have to do this. She reads the name of inn on the piece of paper in her hand-- the Paradise Guest House. She walks by a series of modest cottages, some of them with stone gates and elaborate carved entrances, none of them with names. She feels someone's eyes on her, and glances across the street. A young boy sits on the dusty curb with a dog. The boy is mangy, the dog is mangier. The boy boldly keeps his eyes on her, and after a moment, his lips curl into a grin. Jamie offers him a weak smile in return, but thinks, leave me alone. The boy stands, and within a second, the dog stands, too. The boy is probably 12, Jamie guesses, and wily. He looks smart and vigilant, and she suspects that he's a street kid. Or maybe all kids in Bali look like this. She has no idea. She doesn't know this country. She doesn't want to know this country. But isn't that why she's here? 'I help you,' he calls from across the street. 'No thank you,' Jamie calls back. She hurries down the road, pulling her small suitcase behind here. But in a quick moment, he's beside her, offering to take the suitcase, his hand on hers. She pulls away." "'I'm fine,' Jamie insists. 'You want nice hotel?' he says. Do kids speak English here? Is it possible that last time, in one whole week, she never saw a kid in Bali. She saw the inside of her hotel room, beach-side bars, a mountain trail. She saw Gabe standing in a garden, his feet lost in a sea of orchids and gardenias. 'I don't need help,' Jamie tells him, her voice a little sharp. 'Everyone need help,' the boy says smiling. In fact he has not stopped smiling. He is tall, and he smells like earth and rain. His dog walks at his side like a shadow. It's a skinny pup, some handsome mix of black lab and border collie. Jamie sees a sign outside a gate-- 'The Paradise Guest House.' The sign is painted gold with black letters. She turns abruptly down the path, hoping to lose the boy. But he's quick, and again reaches for the suitcase. He must be looking for a tip. 'I've got it,' she says testily. 'Good-bye.' 'You are tired', the boys says. 'Tomorrow, you will be nicer.' She nods, unsure how to answer him. He opens the gate for her, and lets her pass through. 'I see you tomorrow, miss,' he says. As he closes the gate, she takes a deep breath-- jasmine. The gate shuts out the noise from the street, the boy and his dog, the hot sun, the dust. Her eyes adjust to the cool darkness, and a tropical garden emerges thick with banana trees, ferns, and hibiscus. She follows a path through the dense foliage to a small stone cottage with a carved wooden door, where she lifts a knocker in the shape of a monkey and lets it fall. A hollow, booming sound interrupts the silence. She waits. After a moment, she knocks again, louder this time. Finally, in slow motion, the door creeks open. A man stands there, his hair tousled, his clothes rumpled. Did she wake him? He blinks at her, and runs this hand over the front of his shirt. 'Can I help you?' he asks. His accent is better than the boy's. He adjusts his crooked glasses and peers at her. 'I'm looking for Nyoman.' 'You've have found him.' 'I'm Jamie Hyde.' He stares at her. 'I received a letter from the organization that--' Jamie pulls open her small backpack, and rummages in it to find the letter. 'Yes,' he says, even before she finds it. A smile breaks through the creases of his face. 'Welcome.' 'Were you're expecting me?' 'The man is silent for a moment. His hand goes to his head, and he rubs it vigorously. When he's done, his hair swirls on his head, making him look a little crazy. I should leave, Jamie thinks. But oddly, she takes a step closer to him. 'Tomorrow, you are coming,' he finally says. 'I'm sorry, I thought it was--' 'You are welcome in my house. I'm often confused.' His smile transformed his face. He's probably around 40, Jamie guesses. And though he's badly in need of some grooming, he's a handsome man. 'I can find some place else to stay tonight.' Jamie unconsciously touches the scar on her face, and then she tucks her hand in her pocket. Nyoman reaches for her suitcase. 'Follow me.' He walks past her and out the door. But instead of passing through the gate, and delivering her back onto the unfamiliar streets of Abud, he walks around the house and toward a series of small cottages behind his own. Two young boys stand in front of one of the cottages, both with toy trucks in their hands. They stare at Jamie open-mouthed, and then turn and run, screeching as they disappear into the trees. 'Nephews,' Nyoman says. 'One is loud, and the other is louder.' He is still walking past one cottage, and then another. A very old woman, her skin brown and wizened, sits on the ground in front of one door. She smiles a toothless grin at Jamie. 'Grandmother,' Nyoman tells Jamie. He says some quick words in Balinese to the old woman, and she giggles like a young girl. At the fourth cottage, he stops. Wisteria spills over the front of the house, it's pale violet blossoms filling the air with a pungent scent. The ground in front of the wooden door is covered with petals from the flowers, a blanket of color as a welcome mat. 'Your home,' he says. Jamie feels something unwind inside her, something that had been knotted tight since she agreed to this trip. 'Thank you,' she tells him. 'Now you rest. The flights are very long. I come to get you when it is time for your dinner.' He pushes open the door, and light pours into the single room. Jamie can see a four-poster bed with mosquito netting draped over the top. A wooden bureau with a mirror above it sits next to the wall. The room is simple and clean. She takes a step inside. When she turns around, Nyoman is gone. Standing in the doorway, she gazes out at the garden. There are lights in every cottage. His family, she assumes. She smells incense and she hears a rooster crowing. It is as if she stepped behind the wall of Ubud and found a different country. My home, she thinks. Her real home in Berkeley is a room in a ramshackle Victorian house that she shares with three other adventure guides, all of them usually somewhere else in the world. And her mother had just moved out of the Palo Alto home Jamie grew up in. 'I don't want all those memories of life with your father,' Rose said, when Jamie begged her to keep the house. 'I was there, too,' Jamie said, like a pouting child. She's 32. It shouldn't matter where her mother lives. Maybe it's her homelessness that makes her pine for that childhood bedroom. Or maybe it's a yearning for all those dreams only a kid can have-- parents who stay together for a lifetime, boyfriends who don't die, night clubs that don't explode. She hears the sound of someone singing. It's a woman's voice, high and sweet. The words must be Balinese or Indonesian-- Jamie can't really tell the difference between the two languages-- but she hears something so haunting in the song that she feels herself back away from the door. The woman's heart is broken, she thinks. She closes the door, and the sound stops." So I think I'll take your questions, and then we'll see where that leads us. Pressure's on you now, guys. AUDIENCE: Is this-- first of all, thanks for coming. I thought it was really interesting how you were talking about your interaction with your agent and the auction, and how just saying that one sentence of an idea could give a yes/no or a book deal. And I was wondering how that was different from when you first started writing, and just getting out there in the first place. ELLEN SUSSMAN: That's a good question. In the beginning, when you're first trying to sell a novel, you can't do anything unless you have the entire novel written. Nobody will buy a book idea for fiction. For nonfiction, I've sold two nonfiction-- I've published to nonfiction books, and those were both sold on proposals. So you come up with the idea, you write an introduction, you write a table of contents, you come up with a marketing plan-- which is mostly made up, or a dream. And then your agent sends that off, and you actually get your advance based on a 25-page proposal, and you haven't written the book yet. But with fiction, until you've established a name for yourself-- and oftentimes, even after that point-- you have to write the novel basically on spec, and then see if you can sell it. So I have at least two novels that never sold-- probably three. It's a grueling business that you have to be completely dedicated to for some crazy reason. And I say crazy, because it's very hard to make a living as a writer. It's very hard to sort of fit it in to real life in terms of jobs, and a regular career path. I'm now making a living as a writer, but I started writing-- I decided at age six I wanted to be a writer, and was sort of singularly pursuing that, and then dedicating my life to it from age 21 on. But I didn't start making a living as a writer until I was 48 years old. And then I'm really lucky. I mean, I have lots of writer friends who can't support themselves on their writing. So to get back to your question, you spend this crazy amount of time writing this novel because you somehow believe that you've got a novel in you. Then you have to find an agent based on that novel, and then the novel-- then the agent goes out to sell the novel. So in the first novel that I published, that was the process that I went through. Once I published that novel and developed a relationship with my agent, I can now run ideas by buy her. As you can tell, I don't listen to her. And she kind of doesn't listen to herself. I catch her in one mood, and it changes to a different mood. I am now finishing the novel that will be published a year from now-- it will be published a year from August. And in that novel, we sold it based on the first hundred pages, and that's the first time I've done that. So "Paradise Guest House" was not written at all. It was sold based on that one line, because it was a two-book deal. For the next novel, I wrote a hundred pages, and then my agent went out to sell it. So I feel like I'm very lucky that I can have that sort of vote of confidence in advance. Although, of course now I'm worried that I'm not going to deliver the novel they think that they bought. We writers worry about a lot of things all the time. But it is a crazy business. And it's a really risky business, as a fiction writer especially, because the big idea does not translate, right? That when I said "French Lesson" was a three novellas. It is no different than the book that I finally produced, that hit the "New York Times" best-seller list. But the description of that book is nothing-- three Americans walk the streets of Paris with three French tutors, right? That doesn't tell you anything. Nobody would buy that book based on a pitch. So that only works in the execution, of the writing of the novel, and whatever happens in the storytelling. Whereas in nonfiction, you can pitch, I'm going to write a book that explores this, that, or the other thing, and the publisher will have a fairly good idea of what it is they're going to receive. Fiction, just-- we don't have that luxury usually. AUDIENCE: So in this book, you were going explore-- you wanted to learn, right? So at the beginning, did you know how the book was going to go and what happened? ELLEN SUSSMAN: No. Was the mic on? Did you hear that? OK, great. I don't write with an outline, and it's for very much the same sort of reason that I write to discover. Because I think if I know everywhere that I'm headed, the juice is gone. I want that sort of desperate need to know. So the book that I just sold to my publisher that's coming out next year, page 100 ended with a kidnapping. And I was very scared that my editor, or the publishers, were going to say, so what happens? And I would not have been able to answer, because I had no idea. And I had no idea until page 300, really, what would happen, which kind of kept me going in that way. So with "Paradise Guest House," I knew that I wanted this woman to-- who is very damaged. I set her up, as you could tell from that reading, as an adventure guide. She's very gutsy, independent, worldly 32-year-old. And I did that so that this trauma would affect her that severely. You take somebody who is out in the world, and makes her living being out in the world, and make her scared to step out of her house, and that is big trauma, right? And big drama. So I set her up as an adventure guide. I have her traumatized by the terrorist attack. And I then want her to deal with it. So she's got to go back to Bali to struggle through this to move forward in life. And something had happened there with this American man expat who saved her. And I knew that I wanted them to reconnect to find out what that was all about. And I didn't know what would happen when they did. And I didn't know how she would deal with being back in Bali. So those are mysteries to me that I follow with the same sort of curiosity that I hope the reader brings to it, right? And then, by trusting the story that I'm creating, and the characters that I've put on the page, I kind of let them lead to me-- doesn't it sound sort of woo-woo? But I'm trusting them to lead me to where the right place is for them then to go. So one of the things that I did need to do-- I mentioned the research trip. Sounds like a tough job for a writer, right? Got to go to Bali for a month. And it was fabulous, but it was also really hard work. I knew that I needed to get the taste, sounds, smells of Bali, right? To fill the book with Bali. I also needed to talk to as many Balinese people-- expats-- to find out about daily life in Bali. Gabe, the man she's looking for, is an expat. I needed to understand why expats move to Bali, what their concept of paradise is all about. So those are the kind of easier things to get. The harder things for me were to understand Balinese Hinduism. The Balinese believe in reincarnation. So if you believe in reincarnation, do you grieve the loss of a loved one in the same way that if you don't believe in reincarnation? And I don't know. I don't understand that. So I really needed to learn a lot more about that to be able to include that as part of the novel. And Bali was desperately trying to heal. Bali as an island was desperately trying to heal from the terrorist attacks. And to do so, their religious life affects their daily life in every possible way. So I needed to understand the culture, the religion, and the family life. And that meant doing some book reading and internet research, but it meant more talking to the people who I met there. And then lastly, the most interesting part of the research that I did when I was there-- I met a woman from Berkeley who moved to Bali 25 years ago, and married a Balinese prince, and has been doing all kinds of good work. She runs an organization now that started in 2002 for the survivors of the terrorist attack, and the families of the victims. And its to help them heal, and to educate the kids, and to get money for the-- the Balinese who were injured in the terrorist attacks were mostly the people working in the clubs. In fact, one of the clubs that was bombed didn't even allow Balinese people into the club. It was just for Westerners. So the people who-- the Balinese who are injured in the attacks tended to be poor, hard-working, struggling Balinese, and people on the streets. When the attacks happened, and everyone was rushed off to Sanglah, which is the one major hospital. First of all, there's no burn unit at any hospital in Bali, and the hospital was completely inundated and overwhelmed. So they immediately flew out all the Westerners to Singapore and to Australia. And the Balinese were left with these inadequate conditions for healing in Bali. So the woman I met suggested that I might want to talk to some of the survivors and the families of victims. So my last three days in Bali, she set me up with a driver and an interpreter, and we drove all round Bali to the worst part of the inner city, to these very remote poor villages. And I met with a woman who's just covered with scars from all the burns and the skin grafts that she's had. And while we talked, she had her baby climbing all over her, and this huge smile on her face. And she told me her horrific story, and I had tears streaming down my face. And another woman who lost her husband in the bombing-- he was just riding by on his motorbike at the time of the bombing. And she told the story about waiting for him to come home from work that night. And she could no longer talk after a while. And her daughter who was in high school came up on her motorbike, and joined us and took over, and told the story for her. And ended up by saying, and now she's studying to be a doctor to make sure there are doctors on the island who can take care of the Balinese. These were amazing stories. They didn't go into the book, but they informed everything that I put in the book, because I was learning about the Balinese spirit. I was learning about the truth of what happened, and how-- I just got a fan email. And truly, fan emails-- like, you write a book, and you give it to your friends and your family members, and they have to say they love it, and you don't believe anyone. But if someone who lives in Oklahoma takes the time to send you an email, and you don't know this person, and they just finished reading the book, and they thought they'd write you-- that is amazing. So my fan email is like my highlight of every day. And I got one last week from a woman in Oklahoma who had been a first responder at the bombing in Oklahoma City at the courthouse. And she said that I got the description of the bombing absolutely right. And I was so pleased. That was something I was very scared about. I've never been in a bombing before, and the two main characters race into the nightclubs when it happens. So I really needed to spend time describing all of that. So I think that it was a mixture of all of those stories that I heard, and the time that I spent trying to get the human story, more than anything else. It's not about-- in fact, at its core, this is probably a love story, but it's a love story with terrorism as a backdrop, because it has everything to do with how people heal, and how people find each other when they are going through trauma. So I needed to understand all of that in a way. I could not make the love story work, I could not make Jamie's process towards healing work, unless I really understood what it was that they went through. We have time for another question or two. Someone else? Yeah. AUDIENCE: In your research, did you find that the Westerners healed differently or processed it differently than the Balinese? ELLEN SUSSMAN: It was one of my burning questions the whole time. Knowing that reincarnation is such a strongly held belief-- core belief-- for the Balinese, I really needed to get that. And it's so hard for us as Westerners to understand that. So there's a line in the book where it turns out that Nyoman, the owner of the guest house, lost his wife in the bombing. I'm not giving much away. That comes-- we learn that fairly early. And he talks to Jamie a lot about his experience. And he keeps explaining to her that his wife will be reincarnated probably as his child, which is what they believe. Isn't that amazing? So he has to have children so that she has a chance to return. And I talked to somebody there who-- they absolutely-- they had a baby. A healer came and told them that the soul of the baby was the-- I think it was the mother or the grandmother who had been killed in the bombing. So they feel this very strongly. On the other hand-- so Nyoman says at some point, but I still have a hole in my heart. It doesn't mean that the loss disappears. There are still grieving for someone who was central to them, and whom they loved. But I think it gives a much stronger sense of continuity of healing that that person will come back, that the circle continues that we don't necessarily have. And yet, I don't think it relieves you of the pain of loss. And there's something-- one of the things that I have only figured out, kind of in retrospect. Now that I've published three novels, and I can look back on those novels, I see that there are themes. There are issues-- let's call them obsessions in my life that I will write about over and over again. And loss is the big one for me. I lost both my parents at a young age. And no matter what I'm writing about, loss comes in. And it comes in kind of through the back door. If I were to sit down and say, I want to write a book about loss, I don't think I could create the human story. But because of the fact that I am always kind of confronting my own feeling about loss, and how do you move on when you've lost a loved one? When my characters are struggling with loss, everything I know about that pours into the book, right? It informs my characters' reactions, their experiences. And I think that is kind of the way it has to work in fiction, that we can't do it as consciously. We have to do it sort of subconsciously. And then it will feel more organic, and less manipulated, right? It's not like we're the puppets pulling the strings. We're creating real characters who have human emotions, but those human emotions will often come from our own obsessions, our own life issues. And loss is that one for me. So I'm always surprised. I'm at the point with the new novel that I'm writing now-- that I just finished a first draft-- and it's after I finished a first draft that I look at it and say, what's that all about, what am I writing about? And once I can identify what I'm writing about, I can dig deeper, and I can try to explore it more. But on that first time through, I don't go there, because I want it to be coming not from here, not from my mind, my intellect, but coming from my heart and soul somehow instead. AUDIENCE: What's the best advice you've ever gotten for writing? I'm asking selfishly. ELLEN SUSSMAN: Well, I'd say two things. I am one of the most disciplined writers I know. So I think the best advice is to stick your butt in that chair every damn day. I mean, it is so hard, especially through the years when you're not succeeding. And I had plenty of those years. And you're filled with self-doubt, and everybody else in the world-- we were talking earlier. I moved to Silicon Valley 20 years ago, and everybody I knew was in the hi-tech industry, and I would talk about writing and people were like, what are you talking about? What is that all about? So you feel lonely. You feel isolated. You feel crazy. Nobody-- especially if you've been successful through school and grad school, and you won all the awards, you then think, OK world, here I am. My 20s were such a shocking revelation to me that the world was not waiting for Ellen Sussman. And I couldn't figure out what the hell happened if I was supposed to be a superstar, and instead I could barely get a story published. So suddenly, all of that noise in your head is what it takes up-- that's what takes up all the space in your head. And somehow or another, you have to sit down and work every day, and push that noise out of your head so you're not living with self-doubt, or you're not living with the voice of your mother saying, go be a lawyer. All of those things, and you somehow have this ridiculously cocky, irrational belief that you have the right to tell this story, and you should write that book. So that's probably the most important thing, is to make the space for writing the book, is to create your life in such a way that you can write as close to daily as possible. And then the other thing that I almost always advise everybody is to get a day job, because it just is so hard, and it takes so long, and it puts so much pressure on you. If you can figure out a way to do a day job that doesn't take away all of the time and energy for fiction writing. But the most important is just sitting your butt in the chair. Thank you all so much. [APPLAUSE]