LIVE at The Strand in New York with Natasha Hodgson (+Skipshock audiobook!)

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0:59and friend of me, Natasha Hodgson, the writer and one of the stars of Operation Mincemeat, and also the audiobook narrator for my novel Skip Shock. Now, I know I spoke about Skip Shock a little while ago at the beginning of the summer when it first came out, but it's now been out for a little while. The audiobook is finally coming out, and never in my entire career have I been so proud and so psyched for an audiobook to come out. I think I mentioned this in the podcast you're about to hear, but for me, I only ever really understand the book that I wrote once it comes out in audio because it's the first time I can see it as a whole and not as just like broken up paragraphs on my computer.

1:41And like, for me, this is just like to have one of my best friends in the world record this audiobook has been such a special experience. And to have her interview me about it at the strand in new york just this incredibly prestigious cool bookshop it was really a career high um so i wanted to share that here at the end of the podcast um there's also an extract from skip shock read by tash uh that i hope you'll enjoy as well and that if you have an audio credit left in your bank account we all do somehow everyone joined audible like three years ago and then forgot to cancel it. Now we all have like 16 audible credits or whatever.

2:19I would love if you spent one on Skip Shark because I really do think this is among the best ways to consume this book. Okay, have a great week and we'll be back to our regularly scheduled programming next week and I'll see you then.

2:37Hello! Oh my God! I see all the most beautiful people in New York turned out tonight. Thank you so much. Oh my God, this is such an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much guys for coming to this discussion with my dear, dear friend, Karen Adonio, about her newest book, Skip Shock, all of which I'm sure you are already obsessed with because I absolutely am. Welcome. Hi, welcome to New York. How is being in New York treating you? Being in New York is lovely. Being in New York is always lovely. Being sat here on this stage with you right now. It's pretty weird. Almost 14 years to the day since I emigrated to the UK because Tash phoned me.

3:17That's the power you have to have. Yeah. You have to be willing to leave the country. There was a gum tree advertisement for wannabe film writers. Tash was the editor of a film website, now defunct. Don't go look for it. Now defunct. Like both of our careers, sort of everything has the suffix of now defunct. Now defunct, yeah. Like every media job. It's like, yeah, this no longer exists, unfortunately. but I read your review of Horrible Bosses and I said this is the funniest very important work if you can find it that and Battleship starring Rihanna to really situate you in the time and place I remember reading it thinking this is the funniest thing I've ever read this is like David Zara's fan rotting and well similarly it's so weird to just be doing something like this with literally just your very very dearest friend and like, you know, and when you first came into my life, I was running the now defunct film website and the way that those websites existed in like the early 20, whatever it was, being like, yeah, this website exists and for some reason 17 people are employed here.

4:21It never makes any money. How could this possibly work? This bubble will burst. And indeed it did. And for some reason I was 22 or 23 and somehow running an internship of four people because it was back in the day when, I mean, maybe it still happens, but it was like, you know, when internships were really the thing that everyone was doing in a way that was completely illegal but somehow was sort of fine. I had done an internship for three months at this website company. Now defunct. And I was one of four interns. And the prize was, one of us at the end of this three-month internship would get a job.

4:56And everyone was like, thank you! Thank you! It was like the Hunger Games of online media. And so I got the job. Sorry, those other guys but and there it was and uh and immediately it was like now the cycle must reset you now hire your interns and um on the gumtree ad uh yeah caroline o'donohue um applied and we had and i think you i can't remember what you applied but something something short and stupid probably and we had this yeah it was short and very stupid very stupid yeah and we had a phone conversation where you i couldn't really hear you because you were in ireland and sorry ireland but apparently that's not your strength that's fine and uh you know strength so many strengths though you guys that we're dressed like the Irish flag tonight somehow.

5:33We didn't plan this. For Ireland. We did it. And we had a phone conversation where you, I think part of the, all I remember was me being like, now you have to pitch some article ideas. And as I recall of them, all of them would now be cancelled in 2025. But I loved each and every one of them. And then we got you over and sort of it started then. But I was always so impressed by you. And I think what's so important about like our friendship but i think like all creative friendships like we're going to get into this as we go like to be impressed by your friend is like one of life's true joys and i always feel like you know every group chat thinks that they are geniuses you know what every group chat is right because like you surround yourselves with the people that you think like oh my god this is so funny i have to tell this person and like you were one of the first ever people for me that like I was just like I gotta tell I gotta tell Caroline this funny thing and I think like that has so much like brought up our way of like both writing yeah media and consuming media and it's just been very important to me and so like yeah and and for those who don't know so Skip Shop is the book we're going to be discussing um and it is my eternal and complete honor that um Caroline sort of first came to me with this book like little tiny nuggets of this book like sort of flashes of like images or ideas that were very like very tender and very like nerdy and like and like so nerdy and just like but i think that's the thing is like you you can bring these things to your friend um before you can bring them to scary people and go kind of like what if horses did this yeah type of business there used to be so much more horses there was a lot of horses less horses than advertised there is now a restrained one chapter about horses in it but It used to be eight or nine.

7:20I was cross when the horse got cut. But you know what? I understand now when I get it. But anyway, it all is to say that, yeah, Skip Shock, I'm very delighted that, yeah, Skip Shock is not only dedicated to me and your mum, fine. I can share it with Noelle, don't worry. But also that I got the privilege of doing the audio book for you. And when does that happen ever? The first time in history of the written word, perhaps, maybe? We'll find out tonight. That the person who's performing it is the person who's dedicated to it and who's also a Broadway actress, everyone. Oh, come on. This is her fourth performance of the day.

7:55Yes. You got up at nine to sing in, like, Central Park or something, right? It was Times Square, but, you know. She's not like, guys, it's all the same to her. It's fine. So, yeah, I want to get into, like, I want to get into the book itself, how you came about to write it, like, what all of this means to us as, like, both people who make stuff and who, like, love making stuff. and also kind of where this book sits in your sort of author biography. Because like one thing that I love about you is that you write so many different types of book. You are not like, you're not a one type of author, which I think is like probably like weird for you and people trying to pin you down as the type of author that you are.

8:31But we're going to get into that. But to all this to say, we're going to do some questions at the end. So if you have any burning questions about particularly, I think like friendship and making stuff or like anything to do with Caroline, particularly this book, but like anything that Caroline's read or like yeah how we everything that Caroline's read she's only read four books she's written more than she's read so I guess my first question for you on this book is that it's part of the classic question which is like where does this book come from but I think particularly it's potent for me because off the back of the previous book that you had written The Rachel Incident an incredible book very much concerned with unpaid internships very much concerned with unpaid internships and it was kind of this completely like very exciting but very like sort of slice of life very realistic and like you know Irish story by an Irish writer and like you know I was your friend at the time it was crazy how great it did it was so good it was like and now you're making a TV show out of it like it literally could not have gone better it was crazy and like to me the fact that you had done that and then you were like and now a sweeping time travel fantasy sci-fi aimed at 16 and up 16 and up like why oh my god my age is asking the exact same question we could have done the michelle incident we could have done the danielle incident so many incidents so many common 90s names that we could have had an incident around i yeah i know i know it's like it's like commercially a terrible idea especially once like you spend so long trying to say it with like with awe like i mean i'm not in a kind of what are you doing but like yeah how how did how How did you get your brain from the Rachel world into starting to write Skip Shock?

10:12Yeah. Why did you think to yourself, this is the book that I need to write next? Well, it's so strange because this is my seventh book overall. I've been in the industry for almost 10 years now. I'm still 19. I'm 16. Time travel, baby. And the first two books, all of you will find very difficult to find because they're not available in the US. they were never picked up here and I think although I'm very proud of them for good reasons because there was like even though they did well in the UK and they did well in Ireland and some whatever they had a kind of confusion about them fundamentally because there was like all this kind of funny slice of life girls in offices and sort of what about filmmakers that I really love and it was all kind of like real adults having real problems and then there would suddenly be this flash of special effects that came from nowhere so like promising young women my first novel begins to like kind of like almost like a bridget jones diary just like a girl in a dead-end office job and then it turns out that the do you remember the original title of that book no do you yes jolly politely forget regrets her screen name notice the no reaction by the way how bad a title that is look justice for jolly politely regrets her screen name that's all i was like but that like it starts with this sort of like um you know, Office Place Affair, and then it becomes like a vampire novel.

11:38And understandably, that doesn't work for everyone, especially not critics. And similarly, like, the second book was like a small story about these two female filmmakers on a road trip. And then it became this, like, detective thriller where somebody gets waterboarded for no reason. And there was always just like this kind of, inside you there are two wolves, and in me there's one that's like, I want to just observe, you know, real adults, real situations, and another part of me that just wants special effects. Like, one thing I, like, for every audiobook I've ever had of my books, that is always the moment.

12:18I know there's other authors in the house tonight, but I never read my own books back. When you're editing a book, you're, like, looking at it in chunks at a time. You're editing chapters, or you're following specific characters, or whatever. You never read the whole thing. When I listen back to the audiobook, that's only the moment where I realize, oh that's what I was up to you know that's what I was that's what and why I was doing and I realized as well like I was listening to you say a line of dialogue in this book and it's like the most cliche piece of like genre dialogue but it gave me so much thrill to type it and then to hear you say it it was the line you better hope your man's a surgeon with that pistol and I was like that felt great that felt like like a triple orgasm to tie and it's like there's just like i wouldn't i i refuse to reconcile these two parts of my character you know i i i love both things equally and so i have found so i am i started my young adult series all our hidden gifts and then i was so kind of spent on special effects because it's all about witches and magic and small town mysteries and stuff.

13:23And it's so good. Such a good trilogy. And on sale here tonight, guys. It's wonderful. Yeah, thanks. Thank you. It really is. So good. And then after I was finished, I was like, now I'm just going to write a small Irish story about four people, five people. And that is, I think that's how I'm always going to work forever. And so Rachel was so in this very practical, pragmatic world that this became the next thing. And really, but it comes from a very pragmatic place. So like I mentioned that it's about traveling salesmen they just happen to travel through time and space um and but but it really speaks to a part of my life and career where um I was suddenly after a long time of like moving to London at 21 to work for you and and like living on a mattress in Elephant and Castle for a year and then like slowly God bless internships and slowly working my way but I really didn't travel at all in my 20s.

14:20I don't think you did much either. And then... The most depressing, like, sort of realization with that was like, I remember being in my 20s and like not traveling. And then like, when I was like my 30th year or something, a friend of mine had a wedding in Malaysia. And I was like, oh my God, this is so exciting. And literally, it was getting on the plane and being like, gosh, the technology's caught up in these planes. You know, you can watch loads of films now. Yeah, it's not just three or four. It's amazing. Yeah. How long has it been? Been on a long plane. Yeah. There was a peddling guy in the front.

14:57Yeah, no, I get it. We were poor in our 20s. We were so poor. But we had each other. And he was poor but perfect. Yeah, and so then kind of circa 2018, 2019, when I became a published novelist and also a working journalist, I was traveling a lot for work. And the thing of traveling for work that I find so kind of special and strange, and I'm not doing it right now, is that thing of when you travel alone, everything that happens to you happens only to you. Like you don't have that thing of like having your buddy with you or your partner with you being like, how about get a load of that guy? Or like these customs are strange.

15:35And so when you're on your own and you're being like shot across the world to do something, an assignment or whatever, you have all the you you go you go through spaces alone and and therefore people respond to you differently like you're more likely to have very bizarre conversations or sort of adventures just that lead somewhere um and and that and then you have no one to discuss them with so the experiences live and die with you you know you're because it's like very boring like talking about the group chat to just say in the group chat all day look at this crazy thing that just happened to me guys everyone's like very nice but we're all we're all living our real lives and so you know and like so the kind of first germ came to me when in 2019 where i was sent on assignment to tahiti for lonely planet which is like god i forgot that was so mental i know lucky bitch that hasn't happened in musicals i'll probably promise you that they're not putting on Operation Minceby yeah the Tahiti edition although you could become a cruise ship actor thank you mate thanks you and my mum both you could see the world great respect for cruise ship actors I'm very sorry that was in jest only but customs are strange

17:00customs are strange and so I've been saying to Titi and literally having this experience because it's in the other side of the world where the sun is at the highest point of the day at different times. So 10 a.m. is the hottest part of the day, which kind of fucks with your brain, right? That's a little odd. And then going out, and what would happen if anyone's ever been on a press trip before, they basically, they pick you up at your hotel in a van at like 6 a.m. They drive you two hours on bad roads and you're just in this sort of jostling vehicle with like seven other journalists slash bloggers slash sort of travel influencers or whatever, none of you have anything in common except that you're on this trip.

17:38And often you don't even like them. And I remember - I love you to the word often there. And often. Not sometimes, often. Often you hate them. Because the people who are on these kinds of trips, they live a traveling salesman life. Like this is, you know, in an early chapter in this, there's all these traveling salesmen in this book, they aren't allowed to have permanent locations. They live life on the road. they kind of have temporary homes in these boarding houses that I really kind of like modeled on the sort of spirited away bathhouse kind of thing. I wanted that atmosphere. But there's this big kind of scene where all these salesmen, they sit down and they kind of open their briefcases and they show what they have and they sort of brag and they pontifiquate and they sort of kind of lightly hate each other, but they respect each other's game.

18:21And like that is the green room at any literary festival.

18:28it's it's like so it's such a great strange life and like i remember being on this this tahitian press trip and i was like you know in the middle of the ocean um watching a mother whale signal to her her calf using using just her fins and you could see that she was communicating with him using splashes and you could tell that like as he moved too far from her she would start splashing and he would come back and it was like the most moving non-verbal thing like it's spectacular and then in my ear I had this Daily Mail journalist yapping to me about like like Tim Rice sure and how we thought why wouldn't it be Tim Rice sure and his personal grudge with Tim Rice it's like you have a personal grudge against the guy who made a Kuna Matata why I feel like I want to like jump in just because like because you mentioned Spirited Away And I feel like Not to just like For this whole time Just blowing up your top Because But like I think You know There's obviously a lot of like Literary references But I feel like It's a very cinematic Book to read And like Do you feel like You had as many Like cinematic references As you did like Literary references Yeah Because I really I really felt that I feel like there's The imagery in this book I feel like When you get to Sci-fi fantasy I feel like In the canon Mentioning your names But like The tavern and the mead And the cheese Are doing a lot of heavy lifting For a lot of writers You know what I mean Like there's a lot of mead does a lot of cheese.

19:50I'm like, we love the meat and we love the cheese. But like with your book, I feel like I was, you, I see so many like images and situations and like interactions that like exploded my brain. Cause I feel like, oh, I feel like I've never seen this before. And I feel like you have come to it with the visuals in mind, not just the kind of story in mind. Yeah. Like totally, like very much that, like so much of that boarding house. Yes. It was based on Spirited Away, but also very much based on Hey Arnold. I think we were all waiting for Hey Arnold to get a look We're all relieved he's come up Please say more about Hey Arnold I could really go on a tangent about Hey Arnold How can we tell we can put on Hey Arnold?

20:30I've actually been quite obsessed with Hey Arnold recently Because I do think Elie Pataki Unstop your own of our times Because it was the first noir made for children It was like My god Did you have any idea this would be said tonight in this room? And he was like, I was listening to an interview with the creator, Craig Barlett, and he said I would get in such trouble with Nickelodeon because every week my plot summary would be Arnold gets in another adventure with a very old man. And for real, it was always that, wasn't it? Now that you say that, I'm revisiting that in my head and you're right.

21:03Yeah. I don't know why I have to talk about Arnold, but I do. But yeah, it's super visual. and like again that that is um that thing of like if you spend a year and a half or two years um on on a novel where you're just like for the rachel incident there's like two locations in that book it's like they're terrible flat and the bookshop they work in and sometimes the nice house the professor lives in it's not even that nice um in my head you don't know channel four will decide so yeah channel four will decide how nice it is um and and then the breathtaking scope of um just writing like a a city that runs on on on a clockwork so basically the whole city is a moving sort of clock sort of cog system uh where they kind of all join up at different times and then writing the underside of that city and then writing another world and like and like you could have just thought that is like a book like that like the ego 700 pages the clockwork city and you're like yeah it's one chapter see ya like it's it's so like imaginative and like it kind of makes more like do you feel like as you go through the world you kind of like collect do they occur to you in your day-to-day or is it like it's gonna i'm gonna sit down and imagine a fucking town

22:19it's two things is it or is it a mixture sit down imagine a fucking town no calls on imagining a town I'm so glad you asked this so when I do we've got to get off A Arnold we've got to get off Craig Bartlett and A Arnold but he does give some really interesting interviews I think you should all look into so the hardback of this starts with a map and it's a map that is sort of like if you all look in your pamphlets there will be a test at the end so please do pay attention and it's sort of what I love about it is that it's sort of decorated and obscured with sort of like travel visas that are actually scans of World War II visas that my illustrator found.

23:02And so I'm a very visual writer. I begin every single book I ever write with some kind of graph. And when I was first beginning, that was the hero's journey where it's a big circle and it's... Everyone in here knows what the hero's journey is. If you're in the strand, you know what the fucking hero's journey is. Ask you out the door before you let you in. It's fine. Have you heard of the hero's journey? Have you denied the quest from the elder? um the um but um and so and as i've as i've matured in this profession like that has that has sort of like gotten a bit more complicated and i've found different schemes for planning out different novels but for this one specifically um it began with two lines an x-axis and a y-axis and the x-axis represented temperature and so it's like it's very very warm over here it's very very cold over here and that y-axis represented time so the further up you go for the north you go up this axis the faster time gets so a day could have 12 hours or 10 hours or 8 hours 60 whatever and then the further south you get the longer it goes and like you don't have to have read like you know any dystopian ya fiction to know that like the all the power is going to be generated in one area which is the place where the the days are 60 hours long so like people are living and dying very quickly in the north they're hanging on to wealth and power there for you know a long long time in the south and that has created this kind of power dynamic which is what the main character moon is speaking to in that opening chapter he is a traveling salesman they don't want people traveling they want northerners traveling to southern places they want it to be all very rigid so he has these kind of visa issues and like it is a magical book about visa issues like very i mean we love magical admin we love magical magical admin is the best genre of like the sort of paperwork office.

24:48I really appreciate the magical admin in your book. I feel like you're a girl who understands that like all the little bits, the items, the kind of stamps, that's the good shit. It is the good shit. Like I have great respect for the dragon porn that is currently gripping our nation. And when I say dragon porn, and I have great respect, I truly do mean great respect. But I would just, my sort of more thing would be like a novel in the permits factory of like, how do you - The dragon permit factory. How do you insure a dragon? How do we insure your dragon? Yay, we did it! We did it! And that's the group chat, ladies and gentlemen.

25:31And so when you sit down to make up a town, when you know that all of these worlds are going to be plotted along this kind of X, Y axis, you do the thinking from there. So if you think like, okay, this is a world that's very hot and there's two hours in every day, which is existentially terrifying for anybody who lives there because they're not living very long but also because time is moving really quickly it means natural resources are um are developing really quickly so stuff that we would know like coal and oil or whatever but also like other kinds of material so like they might have like you know for example a thriving underground drug scene because like cocaine comes from plants so they might have their own kind of thing going on cool cool cool there's drugs and um and i you know i thought a lot about things like in other but basically i kept thinking like what would the things that you would how would you run a society if you had just far less time in it than anybody else and sort of like um i i thought a lot about stuff like sex work as well because i thought like wow like if these are traveling salesmen they have they're men and they have needs um and so like finally somebody said it finally someone said it men guys they have needs and so like how would that work and like also you couldn't just have a brothel the brothel would have to be something else like every business would have to be three businesses because you can't go to that many businesses in one day i think also that speaks that speaks to many things but i think like we both come from that from that young adulthood of being like we don't just have one job you've got your job and then you've got your money job and then you've got yeah and like i think and all your work i think and i think what's really nice is like i can feel and i think in to speak boldly in my work too which is like this has to be doing so many things at the same time super quick because i've got the privilege of this person's attention that i'm talking to or whatever for maybe this snap of time and i need them to be to see this or read this or look at this and go this is worth whatever i'm paying for it right now because we girl operation mints me yeah like come on you're like 85 characters jesus christ but I think that is I think that speaks well certainly to you know for my opinion of your writing in that like all your books and particularly this book work so hard and with such like eagerness and heart because like you're not someone who grew up like and then at age 20 was like I'm never gonna have a job I'll write a book yeah and I think you know not you know probably there probably is a bit of a chip on my shoulder but like I feel like yeah I'm I'm I'm always so amazed by just how much you can cram into your books.

27:56But particularly, this book is so huge. And the fact they all came from your brain is just so weird and staggeringly good. I'm just, I'm very proud of you. Losing weight can feel like a roller coaster, full of ups, downs, and being thrown for loops, like when someone brings donuts into the office or your kids' dino nuggets start giving you that look again. That's why there's Noom. They combine GLP-1s to quiet the food noise with healthy habits that help you keep it quiet, even if you get off the meds. Their program is designed to make weight loss a smooth ride, helping you understand what drives you, so you can build better habits to not just lose weight, but keep it off.

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29:49right here in the front first. Hi. Hello. Hi. I'm a huge fan of both of you. I've seen Operation Vince Me six times really quick. Yes. And I'll be there next week. I just wanted to know as creatives, I'm sure you get tons of ideas in your mind. How do you know and pinpoint like, oh, this is the one I'm going to go full on. I'm going to like really dive into and expand on. Is that like something you send to the group chat and like ask your friends or you just decide on your own? This is a fascinating question to me because I think the bad version of that question, which you get a lot on like bad panels, is like, why do you write?

30:24And it's like, but the interesting question is, why did you write this? It's like, you're right. It's like, yeah, every writer, every creator has like a notes app that's filled with one-line ideas. And like, I remember with Rachel Instant, it was a one-line idea that sat in my drafts for like two years. And like, for some reason, one day, enough things in my subconscious nudged it forward that it was the time. And then that became the best financial decision of my life.

30:50and uh and and for this one I think I think it's seizing upon this idea I think a lot of it was wanting to find a way of explaining my own life back to myself the idea of the traveling salesman was like so romantic to me and I wanted to get into that but there was also this thing of um you know I hate to say it guys but we there was a pandemic a few years ago and we all stayed inside and it was that and so um but like there was this uh moment where after the dust had settled after that moment and we had done the grieving that we'd all had to do there was this separate kind of grieving that had to happen which is the grieving of lost time um I think about this a lot with particularly my my single friends who went from being sort of like 29 to 32 and and they were like whoa I was sort of single and like you know on hinge or whatever and now suddenly I I have to think very seriously about the time I lost and what that took for me in terms of like courtship and like who I'm gonna meet and have a kid with one day and that to me makes me so angry um and and and like the you know the the thing that we always talk about and what all artists talked about after COVID was that like nobody wants to read a COVID book nobody wants to hear about it in the movies nobody wants anything to do with it which I find so interesting because like we love talking about shared trauma like that's one of the best things you can do to a society is to have a shared trauma that we can all obsess over so why this trauma do we do not want to talk about at all because because it's existentially so confronting for us to really think about the time that we lost it's why there's no more powerful two-word combination in the english language than life sentence like the idea that someone's having their life taken from them and that's the biggest punishment that we can think of in our whole society is fascinating and scary and like I in this book like Margot she starts it on the cusp of 17 but like emotionally and physically because of the way time is moving in these books she kind of ends about 20 because like she's moving between time and speed that's doing weird things to her body and like I kind of wanted it had to be this because I had to reflect that somewhere and it felt like fantasy was the best place to do it to not bum everyone out.

33:06I think for me, I think it's, if you're having fun doing it, like, I'm, that's maybe a really basic question, but like, I have lots of ideas and I kind of go, right, I'm going to write the big, important fucking, oh God. And then actually, you know, you get three scenes into something and you're like, I could write this all day. And like, that's the idea for me that I'm always going to go with. Like, I feel like if you're, there's like good hard and bad hard. And good hard is like, I can feel like this, I want to, this is difficult, but I'm excited to get there and you know talk to this group like and get into it and this bad hard which is like I know I should this feels like the thing I should be writing because I because I had this experience or because I'm from this place or because I'm this gender or whatever and I think trying to release yourself from like this is my only shiny penny and it's not the thing that I care about like for me it's always it's it's really important to be like just following your actual joy and not the kind of trying to second guess what would be the thing that the fucking industry or that people will want to have from me because life's life's just too short so yeah follow follow what's fun very well said yeah we're gonna take one on that side with christy hello uh really really love the book um so it's dual pov but only one character is a told in first person so you get to learn the world through margo but you get to see the story through Moon's eyes, what made you make that choice?

34:29Exactly for that reason. Yeah, you've totally hit on it. Like, I feel like, again, I've been doing this job, like, the longest I've ever had any job. And I feel like only in the last couple of years have I realized the power of things that I ignored for so long, like tense.

34:49So Moon is told first person present and he's very much surging through the narrative and he's got quite a distinctive voice and he's really fun to write. And that was so much about, again, landing us in a perspective of somebody who this is very boring to. And that, I think, is the magic of Magical Admin, is presenting you with crazy concepts, like having a train that bursts through different worlds or whatever, but somebody who's just worrying about their paperwork and is kind of tired and pissed off and over it. Monsters, Inc. Monsters, Inc. does that. Monsters, Inc. Look, if you're going to bring Henal to the table, Oh my God, Monsters Inc.

35:26Monsters Inc, Magical Advent of Monsters Inc, come on. I mean, this is good. Such a good shout. Thank you. Sorry, it is the Magical Advent story. I could not talk about Monsters Inc. Anyway, please continue. Wow. Yeah, and the... God, that's really... Sorry. My piano phase is over. My Monsters Inc phase has just begun. But the... And then, so that was, you know, it felt necessary. And then Margot, who is really coming at it from our shared perspective, what it would feel like for any of us if we were to be on a train from Cork to Dublin and then suddenly be in an interdimensional situation. And it's really difficult.

36:10The best writing advice I ever got was from my English teacher when I was 14. And we had a list of creative writing prompts that we had to take home for the weekend. And one of those prompts was called The Time Machine. and she said, and for the love of God, if any of you picks the time machine, I don't want half a page in how surprised you are to find a time machine. Because she said surprise is the most boring emotion. It's the least contagious emotion. I'm obsessed with the idea of contagious and uncontagious emotions. Embarrassment, very contagious emotion. Whimsy, the least contagious emotion of all.

36:42If someone's like, you know, wearing a hat and like proud of themselves, you're like, yuck. Wearing a hat and proud of themselves. you've described operation mincemeat once again but that's fine yeah

36:57i love that surprise is the least interesting emotion yeah so if we have like a third person told in almost like a alice in wonderland style of like this is a classical story of a girl who falls through the world we're not going to get right inside her brain because it's boring to hear her be surprised by every last thing um and it also i liked the idea of it placing her within like a tradition of storytelling because she does start the story as a girl and kind of becomes like a grown person by the end. But thank you for that question. We're going to take another one down the back here. Hi. Hey.

37:33My name's Caroline too. Oh, what's up? I don't know why I wanted to say my name, but as you're right, as you should. It's a good one though, right? Have you been enjoying it? Yeah. Yeah, it's okay. I really like it. I wanted to give a compliment and that segues into a question. So I do enjoy a lot of books, but I'm not often surprised. And between listening to the Rachel Incident audiobook, devouring it in like two days while I cleaned my apartment, and then devouring this book, I just feel like you're one of the most surprising authors. Oh my God. I just expect things and then you just, yeah, surprise in a good way that I'm like, my brain is just a light so often.

38:25And I guess I'm wondering, especially with this book, my brain was a light so often. How do you, I'm guessing a lot of other authors, like we fall into these paradigms, like stereotypical societal expected paradigms. And maybe that's how the interesting creative ideas often get filtered out how do you kind of like prevent that from happening because or maybe your brain is just more interesting than others by the way like a couple of people in this row just turned around when you said that being like absolutely huge insight like like yeah you're right but no you're you're totally right so like um i i have a podcast as well called sentimental garbage and um you've been on it taffy's been on it taffy briser acne everybody um and uh and i i have been doing that podcast since 2018 almost as long as i have been a novelist and that what that podcast is about is shame uh because i'm from ireland and i is a catholic and you know it all started from this it kind of it's taken a lot of circuitous roots in the many years i've been doing it but like the main nugget of it is like things that people love that is met with either critical silence or critical sort of derision really.

39:42And that happens a lot with things that women like, and I'm fascinated by that. I could go on about that forever. But I think if you spend hundreds of hours of both saying this stuff on mic, every week I've been doing this more or less for years, and then I edit it myself, right? And so I've been telling the world and myself for years that their genre conventions don't matter. Snobbery doesn't matter. What's literary or not doesn't matter. Like it is, it is the story. It is the thing that gets your heart racing, as you said. And like, I do think I have performed light brain surgery on myself by doing that because like, I'm not going to lie.

40:21Like I do get a lot of funny sort of treatment. So funny looks about like people who aren't that psyched about fantasy, people who are like why when everybody wants to have a commercial literary hit have you just done this other thing that no one's asked for except for the publisher who signed it so but like you know but the the like yeah like and that can be actually like quite confronting sometimes of being like maybe I have made some bad commercial choices or or maybe I could be doing something in this sort of other trouser leg of time that is more uh whatever more literary more this more that but I I just, you got to do what you're interested in.

41:00Yeah, but I think that's like, that's why you're so, you're so strong. We talked about this before, but like, you know, earlier, I think, you know, with fantasy and adventure, like your books are so exciting and they've got so much plot. And I think, you know, I don't know about you guys, but like, it feels like, sometimes it feels like to me, like plot can belong to men and feelings can belong to women. And like, you kind of have like, and I feel like it's very, like you don't get, I mean, possibly it's just my own circuit, but like for adventure, sometimes it feels like it belongs to men and like and I think what's so brave and like and I think you can maybe think about it but like the fact that your stories all of them and include Rachel instant like they are adventures and they're not you know a slim feminine tome no shade to the slim feminine tome I love the slim feminine tome but like I do think there is so much more room than we even realize for women with huge fucking stories and characters and magical admin and like except that one one we don't want to talk about her but like you know there is there's so much room for there's so much room for adventure in women's literature and I do think that like you are such a great kind of like shining light of that and that like you just there seems to be that there's nothing in your brain that's like well I shouldn't do that because of like fucking bullshit nonsense society reasons like you don't have that shame you have a different shame I'm sure but like you don't have that shame and I think like mostly around my body indeed and who can blame you and and

42:27And yeah, I just think, yeah, it's really inspirational for me as well because I think you throw yourself so wholeheartedly and it's like in your soul into these genres that aren't necessarily sort of meant for a woman in your position, which is a stupid thing to say, obviously, but like I find it very inspiring. It makes me kind of want to like go, well, there are no genres that are off limits. And also there is no genre to tell one type of story. and I think we can find ourselves made smaller and slower and slimmer, slimmer, slimmer female tome because we feel like we have to tell a piece of our story or a specific feminine part of our story or what is it like to be a woman in X situation and it's just boring and bullshit and we just write dragon porn all the time Yay!

43:12I never really thought about that before but the other day me and Gav were on the couch and we were both reading and he was reading this Cormac McCarthy book that is about a boy who befriends a wolf and they travel across the country together. It sounded great. And he was crying because the wolf was dead. They love to cry over wolves. Yeah, and he was so moved. And he was like, what's happening in yours? I was like, well, she's waiting on a letter.

43:37That's the two types of book. Crying over a wolf. Waiting on a letter. We have time for just one more question and it's going to be over there. This is like another hour longer. I'm having the best time, guys. This is so fun. Hi. Hi. I'm really excited because I love sentimental garbage and all of your work. And I was thinking about how in Skip Shock and The Gifts 2, you write teenagers with a lot of nuance and dignity. And I feel like sometimes culturally we don't give that to them. You know, like there's a lot of dismissing of teenagers as just this one thing or that one thing. and it comes through in your books how much you really see them as whole complicated human beings, you know, while still writing them quite truthfully as teenagers.

44:26Why was that, I don't know, why is that something that's been on your mind? Why is that audience important to you? And what would you want people to know about writing teenagers that maybe they don't always think about? Thank you so much for that. I really do appreciate that because they're my favorite demographic, I think. um like I've got teenagers in my life I've got my my niece and nephew and they're incredible and unexpected and I I love them and but I think I because I realized the same day as I was like I've never really written a character over 30 like they're they're um as in like a main character um they do tend to be uh quite young and I think what I find fascinating about that is that the moment of a young person's life where their inexperience meets the world and then it's almost like it's like a penny they have to oxidize or something and they they they develop a kind of a greenish patina and then that patina will stay on them for the rest of their life um like my one of my favorite moments of like coming of age that has ever been portrayed in anything is at the very end of hey arnold not far actually not far but at the very end of the Legend of Zelda, Ocarina of Time.

45:40If anyone's familiar with that work. You see now all the books in here are weeping at our conversation. I know. There is a copy of Ulysses that's signed by James Joyce and Henry Matisse. I know. And we're talking about Hey Arnold and the Legend of Zelda. But I will have a literary reference somewhere. But no, but there's a, so if anyone remembers that video game, the whole thing is that you play as Link and you start as a little boy and then you're sent forward in time so you could be strong enough to save the world. And then you go through all your trials and you beat Gamondorf or whatever. And then you're sent back in time.

46:13And the credits of that video game are everybody in the video game who you've met and who you've helped and you've saved their chickens and you've whatever, you've done all these things for these people and they're all celebrating, but they don't know what you did. And you're a child again, you're Link, a child again, sitting on a log, staring into space. And that's how that video game ends. god bless the Japanese like it's so and it's like you've done this like you know many many many hours of playing and then it's like I'm obsessed with what we ask kids to do and then we ask them to go back to being kids and like she can do it all guys it's hey Arnold it's this and that and also I think I know I have to wrap it up but like I actually never read young adult literature when I was a teenager.

47:07I started reading young adult literature when I was 22, 23 when I was living on a mattress in Elfin Castle. Under my command. For context, I only worked for Tash for six weeks. Okay, well. But in a way. Someone did it ever end? I never know. Get me a cup of tea. Sorry. Kind of. But no, and so there was this year and a half where like it was just so difficult. everything was difficult I couldn't get arrested in London I used to just show up at the office and see if there was anything going I remember getting and it was right in that moment of the Hunger Games going huge and I got so bang into the Hunger Games and I remember really feeling like nobody has it worse than me except Katniss Everdeen

47:52and I I think you were about to nobody I'm such a huge thing that's so funny but also I think on the teenager thing like i feel like but you're like i feel like you write amazing teenagers though because like i feel like you have like such a national a natural like passion for stuff like sentimental garbage the reason it is so successful and brilliant is because that you like bring like the love of the thing that you're talking about every single episode in a way that like i feel like as a grown-ups we can sometimes be like i don't know if i want to say how much i love stuff it's weird for me to do that and i think what all of your books do and i think maybe not to analyze you but like for me anyway like it's it's like you're so good at loving stuff in a way that like can feel like we leave it behind when we become adults like we feel like we have to stop something because you know because your world gets so much bigger when you're a grown-up whereas when you're a teenager and a kid the thing that you love is like 60 percent of your time and like 100 percent of your of your attention and then suddenly get that thing gets smaller and smaller because your horizons expand but i think you are incredibly good at for however amount of time creating that thing to be like 100 % again and I think that's like just a really good skill that you have thanks thank you really nice thank you all for coming thank you both for being here thank you Walker as well this has been incredible guys thank you so much guys it was so lovely to talk to you all thank you

49:22part one new Davia one Margot The school pushed for a therapist. Donna Anne agreed to it, not because she believed in therapy, but because she wanted to impress upon Margot how serious the matter had become. She had, after all, sold the watch. And not just any watch, Richard's watch. Donna Anne said it as though Margot had stolen from her mother directly, as if she had purposefully severed her mother's last remaining tie and only out of spite. But Donna Anne had many things, including their house to remember Richard by. Margot had only the watch. It was, technically speaking, hers to sell. The therapist suggested that Margot had depression.

50:09The therapist implied that it was something that was always cooking inside of Margot, even before the crash. That death had stirred up a nature that was naturally morose. Old school reports were summoned and then reviewed. Much was made of comments over her primary school years. Margot is content in her own company, read one. Margot often seems a little lost during group projects, came another. And, this one felt slightly cruel on review, Margot has not left much of an impression on the other girls. He suggested that there was a link between this early Margot and the Margot who, aged 16, sold her dead father's watch, dyed her hair metallic red, and attempted to run away from home.

50:51He thought it was deeper than simply having a dead dad, He said that somewhere down the line, and after more meetings, drugs might be helpful. For the moment, he said, he could recommend breathing exercises. Donna Anne took her daughter and left the therapist's office. There was nothing, Donna Anne said, actually wrong with Margot. If anyone was to blame, it was Donna Anne herself for allowing the leash to get too long. She had left her daughter to her own devices, and it had led to the blossoming of a criminal. The whole thing had gone beyond Timberlough's capabilities. It was time for a change.

51:27It was time for boarding school. They got the watch back, of course. The pawn shop owner, a cash for gold that took silver too, had called Donna Anne after he realised that the third hand only worked when you pushed the timer. The inscription, Richard Madden III, made the owner easy to track down. Small towns don't forget plane crashes in a hurry, much less their victims. And this is how we find Margot, in the moments before she fell through worlds. A 16-year-old failed runaway with a watch and unsuitable clothing. Six days off her next birthday and on a train from Cork to Dublin. Thirsty. So, so thirsty.

52:09The summer had arrived late in Ireland, as it almost always does, with hot weather such a rarity that no one knew how to protect against it. She did not bring sunglasses for the immense glare of light through the window. She had not brought her water bottle. Her only snack was a sweating ham sandwich, gluey with heat. She picked at the sandwich and got thirstier by the minute. The train screeched to a halt inside a blackened tunnel. She waited a moment. A voice came over the loudspeakers, a fuzz of static obscuring the driver's words. Something was broken. He repeated himself, and Margot listened closely.

52:48She understood nothing. Then silence. When she had boarded in Cork, there had been a smattering of other travellers in the train car with her. But they had all gotten off in Mallow, and now she was en route to Dublin alone. She became uneasy. It felt like being strapped into a broken rollercoaster, wondering whether her terror was normal or simply part of the ticketed experience. The open windows, which had been the train car's only air conditioning, let in nothing but dead heat and a dank, earthy smell. There was a faint whiff of piss, and she wondered whether people sheltered in these tunnels at night.

53:24As the darkness pushed in on the train and the loudspeakers continued to express garbled, apologetic sentiments, Margot felt her throat grind with anxiety. There was nothing really scary at all happening, she told herself. She was just dehydrated. This was why she had a headache. This was why she was panicking. There was a shop somewhere on board. There had to be. She needed water. She got out of her chair, keeping her hands on the seat headrests in case the train suddenly started moving again. As Margot moved through one empty car after another, there was a mounting sense that she was in a problem that a Coke Zero could not solve.

54:01Eventually, she came to a shuttered counter that usually sold snacks and drinks. Through the shutters, she could see cans winking at her. Margot threaded her fingers mournfully through the gaps, like a mother visiting her son in prison. She looked down at her silver watch, slung low over her palm, and reasoned that she would sell it all over again for a single can. She was alone, on a broken train. A wild sadness rushed through her, not for the situation itself, but because of how much this moment felt like all the ones that had led to it. She had been a clean and well-running thing for so much of her life.

54:38She was an only child, and not the kind who had lots of cousins and neighbours to compensate. Their family was a strange and quiet one. Love was gained through achievement and maintained through behaving pleasantly. She had been a good student and she had some friends, despite what those early school reports had implied. Then, her father died. Her habitual insomnia and moody periods became her permanent companions. She was sleep-starved and in shock. She stopped talking to everyone, stopped going to school, and eventually her friends stopped calling. Life was too hard to put up with for a moment longer, so she decided to run away.

55:18She didn't get far. Boarding school was meant to be the compromise, a fresh start. Yet here she was, stuck, clouded with menace and alone. No fresh start and no bad dye job could change that. She was silly for thinking it could. The train started moving again. There was a sharp, screeching noise that sounded like metal on metal, and she knew the train was fighting hard against the darkness. Before she even had time to apply this metaphor to herself, the compartment shook, and Margot was thrown by the momentum. She steadied herself, one arm clutching furiously to the wall. As the train moved faster and faster, she inched her way to the rubbery airlock between train car doors.

56:03In the airlock, she started to feel sick. It suddenly felt as though all her internal organs were crowding together and looking to escape through her neck. Would she vomit? Here? On Erin Road, Erin property? Margot closed her eyes and remembered Cork, where everyone got the bus everywhere. She could no longer keep her balance by holding onto the wall and instead curled into a ball on the floor, her eye sockets resting on both knees. As the airlock rocked and screeched, Margot wondered if this was what it felt like to die. She pushed the timer on her father's watch, the thin hand that only ticked for 60 seconds, and stopped again.

56:42She practiced the breathing lessons that the therapist had taught her, timing her breaths in 10-second intervals, watching the third hand strike two, then four, then six. Breathing in, breathing out. And when she opened her eyes again, the train had changed completely. Everything was wooden. The industrial plastics had been replaced by dull mahogany. The sticky, pissed-soaked air had thinned. It was suddenly cool, like a window was open and letting in a chilly winter. Margot rubbed at her arms in her thin denim jacket, her cheap summer dress soaked with sweat. She stumbled back to her seat, the car still empty.

57:24Although not, she suspected, because passengers had changed for Mallow. The itchy seat coverings that her legs had prickled against just moments before were now a deep red velvet, torn in places and showing stuffing. Her legs wobbled as she walked. But one other thing, she realised, had changed. She wasn't alone anymore. A figure, a man, was asleep with his head against the window. His suit jacket was draped over him like a blanket, and his shoes, a pair of dark, battered brogues, were on the seat in front of him. Her seat? She could sit somewhere else. There was, after all, no one else on board.

58:04But to sacrifice 57B at this point was to let go of reality. She needed to talk to someone. Anyone. A grown-up. She watched him, her gaze packed with need, wondering if that alone was enough to wake him up. His grey eyes opened quickly and fell from her hair to her feet, taking detailed mental notes on each part of her. Margot could do nothing but stare back. He was not, as it turned out, a grown-up. What age she was exactly, she couldn't tell. Every element of his appearance both proved and contradicted the idea of maturity. His mess of thick brown hair said boy, the grey streaks in it said man, his quick mischievous smile was definitely boy, his dark suit was absolutely man.

58:51the one thing about him that didn't figure into the algebra of how old he was was the tattoo that started at his temple and arched around his left eye the tattoo was the thinnest sliver of a crescent moon hello he said at last

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