Teddy Wayne, Author of 'The Au Pair'

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2:13Teddy Wainwright's novels you can't put down. I already know I'm outnumbered, but go ahead. Yeah, sorry, Carol. No, you can hang. I can hang. You can hang. All right. Teddy Wainwright's novels you can't put down. I know this because I've read all seven of them. They include The Winner, which has been optioned by Sony for a film starring Tom Holland, The Great Man Theory, The Love Song of Johnny Valentine, Capitoil, and others. Teddy's a novelist, a screenwriter. He's also a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, McSweeney's, other publications too. He was a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, Penn Bingham Prize, and Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

2:46I feel like it's Outlander for guys. I'm just going to put it out there. But anyway, his new book, The Au Pair, is a literary thriller that comes out tomorrow. We're not going to spoil it. We're going to get to that in just a moment. Teddy, of course, joining us in our Bloomberg Interactive Brokers studio. Welcome, welcome. Thank you for having me. Your book is being kind of passed around our newsroom, to be quite honest, and different people reading it. Anyone who reads your book, and I listen to a bunch of podcasts, it's often men who make really questionable, or in some cases, really bad decisions.

3:18What's up with that? I think I'm just entranced by the idea of someone destroying their life who has a pretty good one, a fairly accomplished or content life, but is driven by the American pursuit of more and more, more happiness, more money, more sex, more status. And that ambition is their downfall. Why are you so interested in that? I live in New York City. It's all around me. That's so fair. I'm at Bloomberg right now. That is so fair. It's a mecca of ambition and status and money. It does feel like we live in a society, certainly in the New York metro, it's never enough, right? It should be.

3:57We all know that instinctively. We all have been taught that over and over many times in our lives. But when you're actually presented with the opportunity and the potential to get more, it's very hard to turn it down. There was somewhere on a podcast you talked about billionaires specifically. And you were like, you know, that's not what people really want to be or shouldn't be. It's not like all of a sudden everybody's so happy or like everything's solved. There is that stat, I'm sure you guys know that, that study that people's happiness rises to a certain income level and then maybe tails off.

4:27I think the original number is$75 ,000 a year. They upgraded that to$150 ,000 or something because of inflation, perhaps. I strongly believe that past a certain point, it actually goes down your happiness, that you might have more material comfort, of course. you might feel in some sense like you won at life but the people i know who are in that kind of ultra rich high net worth category tend to have thinner relationships tend to feel like if they don't recognize it themselves that people like them for their money and their power and i think it's very difficult to have that kind of level of of wealth not even income and still have an authentically happy life.

5:09Well, perhaps that's a good segue to talk about your new book, The Au Pair. It goes on sale tomorrow. We're speaking with Teddy Wayne. He's a novelist, author, screenwriter. The Au Pair is a literary thriller. It's about a middle-aged novelist who lives in Brownstone, Brooklyn. He's married. The marriage is not so great. A young Norwegian au pair enters the picture. Okay. Right there is trouble. I mean, come on. Well, I'm not going to give everything away, but let's just say things get a lot messier than it sounds like they're they're going to get. You talk about writing about what you know and what you're surrounded by.

5:42That profile of Steven, the main character, middle-aged, plays pickleball. I guess you play pickleball too. He has two kids, lives in a certain part of Brooklyn. That's very similar to you. Adjacent to me. I live in Cobble Hill, not Brooklyn Heights. I do have two kids. You just got to cross Atlantic Avenue to get to it. His career trajectory and his financial situation in the household is different from mine. He had a massive hit when he was nine years earlier before the novel starts. His second novel was a bust. He's financially dependent on his wife who works in private equity. That's not my situation at all.

6:20I've observed, though, both the plight of the novelist who had a sort of a big bang of an opening and then a whimper in their next phase. and I've observed separately a number of men who are financially dependent more or less on their wives and they tend to respond to it better than Stephen does. There's a lot of insecurity here, a lot of sense of emasculation. His wife is not too thrilled with the arrangement either. So I was interested in exploring this phenomenon that didn't really exist in America 20 plus years ago, certainly not 30 plus years ago. It's not widespread now, but it's much more common than you'd think.

6:58And there's nothing wrong with it objectively, but I think the genders have still figured, trying to figure out how to, how to adapt to it. I found it notable that you, you wrote about how, when you started this process for writing this book, you started it as a screenplay or maybe a short story that could turn into a screenplay that you could give to your agent who could then go and sell it to a streaming service. the the economics of writing a novel in in today's environment is that the way you have to approach something in order to like make the economics work make it financially work you have to think about all these different income streams if I didn't live in Cobble Hill Brooklyn maybe I'd have a little more leeway but because I live where I live and I'm not a professor at a university this is the only way I make my living is writing so it's a bit of a rare breed now I think again the type of me, the guy who earns a living as a novelist, was in proliferation 30 plus years ago in American life, probably from like 1920s up until about 2010.

8:02The industry has contracted greatly. It's much harder to make a living as a novelist, certainly as a literary fiction novelist, let's call it. So yes, I had this idea of 30, 40 page short story. I'd had a nice film deal with a winner. Let me write this as a short story. We'll sell it to Hollywood for IP. highly cynical origin story. I'm aware of that. Once I started writing it, though, I got very excited by it, by the themes, by the characters, by the setting, by the plot as well, and decided to turn into a novel. So that was a quick, short-lived idea, but I used that initial conception of this is the only way to make a living now for a guy who's trying to support a family as one of the major themes of the book, that Stephen is now a failing novelist who's financially dependent on his wife who can't make much money as a writer anymore.

8:51This undergirds all his anxieties pretty much. As a writer, is that kind of rewarding to start out like with a shorter mission and just be like, wow, I'm just really loving this and I'm going to run with it. It is when it works out well. If it doesn't work out well, it's quite, maybe I should have kept it at that short level. You know, we're approaching this as broadcasters, as reporters, and I couldn't help but notice in this book and some of your other books, I'm not going to, again, not going to give anything away but you you thank um people within a profession i'll just go ahead and say it like an nypd detectives bureau a prosecutor in the bronx who you've leaned on in the past and it's almost like you reported out certain parts of this book by making sure that uh it works in terms of like if somebody in a profession in a legal profession were to read it they would say okay wait a second that's how things would would actually unfold can you talk about not the creative process, but the actual reporting process in this?

9:48Absolutely. I'm not a criminologist. I have no police background, as you might be surprised to find out. So I have these two friends, a detective and an assistant DA. I feel like the one detective and one assistant DA who are both avid readers of literary fiction. So it's great to have them in my back pocket. They helped me a lot with the winner as well. There's a crime in that too. And I wouldn't know the first thing about what police do, what lawyers do. You get pick up some things from life from watching enough courtroom thrillers and so on. But it helps to have people who are experts. And not only that, they've helped me come up with plot turns for both these books.

10:29The ending of The Winner was completely invented by my DA friend who knew about this specific thing. I won't spoil it for your viewers, that not many people knew about, which he gave to me as this is a great twist for the ending that is even a lot of cops don't know about it. That's pretty cool. And I'm not sure if I've gotten this right, but I thought I'd heard on a podcast too that the ending for this book, you were planning to go one way and then you went to it, was it a school event or something and actually talked to a father at the school event who kind of talked with you about some stuff and kind of helped shape you?

11:04The ending was a little bit quieter and subtler, and I'd been working on it. I kind of knew something was wrong. I went to my daughter's preschool graduation party. Which you love to do, right? Which I'm always up for going to a preschool graduation party. We've all been there. Where were you last week? We've all been there. It was at the club. It was the after party. We were assigned another dad there. He works for a company. I can't say what it is because it'll spoil. the last sentence of this book has a twist in it. So I can't say what he works for, but we talked for a while. I'm generally interested in people's jobs and ask what they do.

11:40The next day, my wife and I were talking about the book, and she said, I think you need something else here at the ending, but I don't know what. But it's currently not working. And I realized what this guy does for a living could play a big factor in that, and I ended up rewriting it based on that. Okay, go ahead, Carol. Do you and your wife often talk, you're both writers, like do you often you both work from home like do you often kind of bounce off of each other we do um literally because we live in a small apartment and we are constantly in each other's way but her name is Kate Greathead she's a wonderful writer too her last book is called the book of George I'd say we're probably each other's first and last readers I think first and last line of defense um plenty of discussion while we're in the midst of things not the kind of couple where we show each other every single page we write that night but good to have someone in your own field who you can talk with about your own work, but also about broader literature and movies and so on.

12:34How much does a draft stay consistent? I know it's dependent on the draft, but this, for example, the au pair, which is coming out tomorrow, stay consistent between first and last draft. The spine stays consistent. I've written this and the last book very quickly, the first draft. My new method is write it as fast as possible. at a blitz-like pace to slightly match the pace of the reading experience. I want to write books that are page turners, that are quick reads, that people tend to finish in one or two sittings. So I wrote them so quickly, they're necessarily short, too, because of that. So the revision process tends to flesh it out and deepen things.

13:17You get ideas like that ending twist. Plenty of other backstory and other elements of character and psychology and narrative end up coming in, too. We're speaking with Teddy Wayne. He's a novelist. He's an author. He is a screenwriter. His new book, The Au Pair. I want to talk a little bit about some themes that have come up in your work in the past. One of them is technology. And again, I'm not going to give anything away, but technology features prominently in this book and also in another book. and I'm just I'm just wondering the world that we live in today you talked earlier about how we're reading less so or buying fewer books perhaps some of that time is being taken up by us being addicted to our phones and information coming at us from every different angle where we're kind of measuring everything too I'm just wondering how you view technology I'd say all of it's being taken up by that I think that's the main difference between now and 1950 certainly but even 2003 let's say.

14:14I'm susceptible as anyone else. I spend a lot of time on my phone. I'm not proud of it. I don't like what it does to me. I can't resist the allure of a glowing device that has access to everything in the world ever made much of it bright and shiny and video and visual. So I understand why people are drawn to these things. I do my best to have my children resist it. But there's only so much you can do with it. And it's certainly leading to the erosion of my industry as a writer, but it's not doing great things for most people's characters and personalities, I'd say. What do you hope when somebody reads your book, like they walk away with?

14:55Because I do feel like there's messages about society in there. And I think I mentioned earlier, like the transactions that we see in our economy, the power structure, whether you see it right off. There's just always someone that can be above someone in positions, but it's a part of a lot of your books. Well, first, I'm trying to entertain people and to write something that will make them put down the phone or their laptop and just read a book. Secondly, I think art can serve two essential purposes. It can comfort the disturbed or disturb the comfortable. Comforting the disturbed is a great thing.

15:33It's not really what I do. I'm in the business of disturbing the comfortable, specifically the probably upper middle class, professional class that might buy a hardcover novel and have time to read it on the beach, say, or on their vacation. And an attempt to make them look around their environment, look at themselves with new eyes in a way that I think fiction can often be anesthetizing or anodyne and make us feel good about where we are and about ourselves. And there's nothing wrong with that again but i'm more interested in making people question themselves and other world and other works of art often like movies or something like the anatomy of fall right that inspired this i mean you are inspired by other works that are out there you have to be it'd be strange to to be closed off by that um i've heard of writers who say they don't want to read other novels other fiction while they're writing i don't know how you would do that but i'm always looking for for what might rub off on me i think it's important to have a bit of a mag pie sensibility to pick things from anywhere, whether it's another novel is the obvious place, but film, music, and then of course, real life and little moments from real life.

16:41One of, I think, was it, was Capitolio your first novel? So it, it's a 2010 novel. It tells the story of this young immigrant from Qatar. It's very, it's actually very Bloomberg. Like, you know, he, he comes and, you know, works on wall street. he creates this algorithm to trade oil that ends up being really successful. There's a character in there who runs the fund that he works for, and he builds this relationship with him, and he goes and visits him on his estate in Connecticut, and there are helicopters involved, and lots and lots of money. Was there a specific individual, like hedge fund manager, you modeled that person off of?

17:17Not hedge fund. I think each book of mine is an attempt to be some kind of diagnostic assessment of America at the time it was either written in and or the time it portrays. And this is post-financial crisis. But it takes place pre-9-11. Takes place in 1999. So it, but it's meant to be in its own way, a kind of post-9-11 novel about the 9-11 world, even though it's all set before that. So that book was, again, as you pointed out, he develops an algorithm that uses news articles. It's been a while since I read it or thought about it. uses news articles and algorithmically sifts them to predict oil futures.

17:55It felt like a kind of metaphor to me of, let's say, 2003 to 2000 and whatever U.S. foreign policy of some kind of exploitative oil acquisition and profiteering from Iraq. So that guy was not modeled off a specific individual. I was more thinking about the Dick Cheney style of foreign imperialism. All right, so I've got to ask, I mean, did you have a Norwegian au pair? I'm just kidding. Swedish. No, we've not even had a nanny, or we rarely even get babysitters, to be honest. So it's all invented. Writer's block. It seems like there's a theme often where you have a writer or somebody who meets somebody, whether it's apartment or this book where somebody who isn't necessarily a writer by training or something can write so naturally.

18:48Do you have writer's block a lot or like why is that a fun theme for you? So I have a strange situation of once I get started I can't stop and I'm very excited to write and there's no problems. It's between projects that I think I'll always I always fear I'll never come up with another idea or another idea worth pursuing. Get it. And that is a probably chronic lifelong anxiety that I'll be afflicted with forever. Invariably something pops up and I get an idea and I run with it, but there's often a several month gap between the end of one project and the start of a new one where I do feel that sense of a block.

19:25And that might inform these characters. Is that where you feel you are right now? Or do you feel like you have, with this new book coming out that you worked, you know, it's been quite a while in the making. Are you ready to start a new one? I'm in the midst of working on one, so I'm good for now. But when this is over, I still feel like what's left. All right, so the book is out. Tomorrow. Tomorrow. A teaser, we don't want to give it away. 30, 40 seconds for those who might be listening. Of what it's about? Yeah. Failing middle-aged Brooklyn novelist hires an au pair, 24-year-old Norwegian au pair who upends his life and bad things happen.

20:00All right. Summer read as we kick off the summer officially. And it already has been sold to Has it been sold Who bought it for streaming rights Fifth season, a big production company They do, I think, severance and things like that So would it be a series versus a one-off? Film Alright, well congratulations Thanks so much for joining us Good luck with it Thank you so much, this was really fun Teddy Wayne, of course, joining us The book is The Au Pair And there's lots of books And you've read them all I've read all seven and I will read the eighth one.

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