Sen2mental Garbage: The Difficult Second Novel with Monica Heisey

0:00This podcast features Monica Heisey.

0:37Hello and welcome to Send 2 Mental Garbage, a season of sequels, comebacks and second chances. My name is Karen O'Donoghue and I am the fourth installment in a series of children had by my parents. Joining me is the sequel to her own twin sister, it's Monica Heisey. Hi. This makes it sound like this episode is about family and it's not. The sequel to her own twin sister. Demand was so great that six minutes later, the studio pumped out another one. I know, I'm part of like a four-part Elena Ferrante kind of tale, really. My brilliant Caroline. But Monica, today we're here to talk about kind of a format-breaking thing for this podcast, which is often your role when you come in here, is that we do something that's a little bit loose, a little bit like conceptual, which is the phenomenon of second novel syndrome.

1:28I'm very excited about that. A little bit loose and a little bit conceptual is like the note that I get on everything I ever submit to anyone. They're like, could you put, could there be more like action and event here? And I'm like, I don't know. I was feeling kind of loose and conceptual. And you do it so well. I think what made me so fascinated in this is that second novel syndrome is something, a phrase I hear, sometimes even not applied to fiction itself. You hear about second album syndrome, basically the idea of someone's second big outing after they've had their first big outing. Obviously, I've spent the majority of the last decade of my life writing novels and therefore being around other people who write novels.

2:06And so I have witnessed second novel syndrome in people in various stages. And one of the things I've witnessed is that people tend to go a bit mental when they put out their second novels or in the process of writing them. And you're someone who had a very big debut novel called Really Good Actually, which is basically literally anywhere you can find books. And I don't just mean bookshops. I mean, like, I mean, libraries. I mean, coffee shops. I mean, you go and see a house on Rightmove and they definitely have really good actually there. Like every time I've ever gone to check out a house, either your book or Dolly's book is there.

2:45And you're also someone who's coming out with their second novel. So, Man, before we get into the details of Second Novel Syndrome, why don't you tell us what Small Pond is actually about? Small Pond is about four friends living in Toronto. And they all are at a point in their lives where the mad dreams of their early 20s that kind of brought them all together as friends and as lovers and collaborators are kind of not bearing out or bearing out in ways that they are surprised by. and it's about them all figuring out their relationship to the concept of success and the concept of artistic compromise and I guess trying to answer for themselves what a good version of a creative life looks like if it can't look exactly how you wanted it when you were 21.

3:33It comes out in June of 2027. I'm really excited that it's real, that it's physically real. I held a proof the other day for the first time and it feels so nice. It feels kind of just as nice as the first time. I love this book so much. And I haven't, you know, this isn't just a like, let's talk about how brilliant my friends are podcast, but it often goes that way. And it is my favourite thing you've ever written. And I think part of why the reason I loved it so much is that it gets at a subject that is my favourite thing to be explored out in literature, which is the burdens of living a creative life.

4:09Small Pond specifically is about a group of friends who are all pursuing creativity and artistry in their own way. And, you know, some of them make it bigger and some of them don't, and some of them are content with where they are and some of them aren't. But it is very much about elements of jealousy and how that might erode relationships. And it occurred to me as I was reading Small Pond that it has a lot in common with a lot of my other favourite novels, my favourite second novels, which is that novelists digesting the success that has happened to them. Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, what I think is that makes people go a little bit crazy about a second novel is the idea that you're starting to build a body of work.

4:49So when you have a first book, this is just something you made. And it's something you've been thinking about. And it's full of ideas and preoccupations of yours. But you're not setting out who you are as an artist the same way that you are when you start to have multiple things that you've made. So I think the second one feels like a lot of pressure in that way because you're not just saying this is what I was thinking about. You're saying like this is what I think about. This is how I think. Yeah this is how I think and these are the sort of preoccupations of my life or my work. Yeah. Insofar as you can delineate the difference between those things and I'm not sure you can in this kind of work.

5:29But yeah, I think I was very aware that certain preoccupations of mine were going to become part of my thing by doing this book. Yeah. I'm really excited to talk about this because, you know, I spend so much of my time talking about pop culture that's already been made, but very little of my time talking about the pop culture that's being made all around me by friends and peers all the time. And this pattern that I've witnessed over many years, and I'm sure I experienced it myself because I've written a bunch of novels and it was so long ago where I wrote my second that it's kind of dim to me what it must have been like almost but a pattern that frequently emerges is that somebody has like a something of a patina around them like they're a journalist online or they're a podcaster or they've got a big newsletter or whatever they get their debut novel deal it's often part of like a two book deal and like the first splash you'll ever see about it is like in the bookseller or in publisher's marketplace and it'd be like so and so six way auction two book deal and then they'll give you some sort of slightly tacky illusion to how much money it would have been and if it says six figure deal that means it was a hundred thousand pounds exactly and then after that it's like it'll be like almost a quarter of a million seven figure deal it'll be very like vague and tacky and you'll meet that person at a party and they will have the kind of the glow of the anointed about them because they're like you know they're like yeah this is crazy because I was just writing this thing in the mornings or at the weekends and then finally I've got together and like I'm really excited my publishers are amazing my agent is incredible and they just they look like they're in a cult on drugs and have managed somehow to be like a high-ranking bishop in that cult and they're like this is wow and a version of how that might go will be like oh we're on the you know summer book club thing we're on the 100 books to read this year thing we're on the new releases i'm being featured as part of these like sparkly new debut novelists i'm on a panel about debut novelists and it's like very full and and and very much and like maybe they'll get a movie option deal and that will be all exciting and then as everything goes in this industry, the cycle just moves on.

7:54And suddenly, some people who were just getting used to a certain amount of attention, and also are within a profession where people really shouldn't be getting attention, because writers are mostly quite strange, and like to be left alone. So they get used to being treated like Celine Dion, the world moves on. They're like, okay, well, time to work on the second. And they find that their publishers seem less interested, their agent seems very busy and that's when the madness kicks in that's interesting that's an interesting option for the source of the madness if anything I felt that maybe the source of the madness was knowing that the three months of being Celine Dion could happen again because I don't think anyone becomes a writer because they love having their photo taken and yeah you know public speaking and and having to like really have their shit together conversationally at any random moment the sort of slightly kind of politician's wife feeling like the book is the politician and you're the first lady of the book and you have to kind of your own book you're the Hillary Clinton of the Jackie O of your own book and you kind of have to you know shake everyone's hand and be lovely and and even if you feel nervous or strange or like 90 people posted a photo of you from below and the side after an event that you thought went pretty well.

9:16I think an awareness of the publicity side of releasing a book and the demands of that. And also I think of the responsibility. Meeting readers felt so exciting and so it felt like so much pressure to me because I had been naive, I think, despite being like a very avid reader my entire life and knowing this to be true for myself as a reader. I was really naive about how intimate it is to read someone's book. You know, like you're carrying that book around with you. You're taking it in the bath. You're reading it before you go to sleep at night. It's with you on the bus. You're like distracting yourself from a bad breakup a lot of the times in the case with my book.

10:00And I was meeting readers who had had really intimate experiences with something I had made. And I think an awareness that that might be the case with a future book definitely made me it got me in my head a little bit when I was writing the second book I figured out a way through it but I think I had to confront how intimate and intense the author right reader relationship actually is in a way that I was totally in the dark about when I was writing the first novel you know you're not really supposed to write with like hundreds of possible readers in mind this is the other side of it as well and that like we're more vulnerable to feedback than we've ever been like if there's there's so many different ways for it to reach us including being tagged on instagram on a two-star review straight up tagged being like you're gonna want to see this i had a worse time than i thought reading your i would reading your book and i think you should know that at like 8 30 a.m on a wednesday Yeah, that weirdly doesn't bother me as much.

11:02It's more that it's just, yeah, it's one of those things that I think if you think about it too much, if you think about the reality of the fact that you've written something that X number of people have read and had any kind of emotional response to, good or bad, you just feel crazy. Yeah. Which is maybe where some of the pressure comes from. and there's something so depersonalizing about the process of selling your work anyway. Yeah. That you're like, oh God, I'm creating essentially like a weird Madame Tussauds wax sculpture of myself. That never changes either. Yeah. Like things that you believe in one book that like, oh, that's something that really freaked me out because my first novel came out in 2018.

11:41Is this Promising Young Woman? Yeah, yeah, Promising Young Woman. No relation to the film, although. Famously? although I'll never forget where I was when my agent called me and said I've got a bunch of producers who want to meet you and I was like this was years ago and I was like oh why he was like well since you won the Oscar for best original screenplay right and congrats on that yeah no it was a great night really exciting but it only occurred to me recently I think I had to flick through it for some reason or another and like I wrote that book when I was 26 and like still working in full-time office work and getting up at 6 a.m.

12:18every morning to do it and gave up drinking for a year just so I could therefore get up at 6 a.m. to do it and was very impassioned about it. And as you say, it was like this private project that I got to do to sort of prove to myself that I could. Obviously, you dream about things that could come of it, but really it was just an artistic project to see whether it could. And now it's like, and that book will just stay out there. The things that that character sort of believes that I may have also believed at that time, she'll just, that will just keep being sort of ascribed to me forever, like a kind of a melting waxwork.

12:54Well, I think, I mean, this is one of the things that was challenging and then ultimately very fulfilling about writing Small Pond is that I was aware of how much of myself was going to end up being exposed in a way that I wasn't with Really Good Actually because what I learned from Really Good Actually is that when you're making something, you can think you know what you're writing it about. And then the real thing that you were trying to avoid writing about is always in there too. And you are always showing so much more of your ass than you think you are when you make any kind of artwork, I think.

13:30There's always something really essential to you in the work and it is often much more exposing than you would like. So the first time I was able to write a lot freer because I didn't know what it was. And when I was writing Small Pond, I was sort of on the lookout being like, what unbelievably intimate truth am I going to reveal, you know, by accident in this story that's a totally fictional story and is told from four perspectives. But there's still going to be something so intimate at the core of it. And in many ways, I feel like despite it being less autobiographical, it's so much more intimate piece of work.

14:06And why is that? Because it's about this thing that we're talking about, which is the feeling of wanting to be seen doing the thing that you're doing, not just to do it. And what it feels like when you are seen doing it. And I think that's the thing that I was reckoning with. If you're kind of to go with your theory that like a second book is people reckoning with the fact that the first book went a certain way. Yeah. And what was very strange for me in the experience of Really Good Actually was being seen by that many people at that one time. Because it was like a monster hit. It went away. It is a monster hit.

14:46But like, which is obviously worth being incredibly proud of, you know. Yes. But I had to confront how totally uncomfortable I was. And it feels very paradoxical because the book in large part is about the question of artistic ambition and how much that ambition includes finding a large audience and whether or not that's not necessarily part of everyone's artistic ambition. And I think I was so excited to reach a large audience and felt really shy about it. It really tweaked something in me. I found the experience very nerve wracking and a little bit. I just felt very vulnerable. And so I think the book ended up being in large part, I mean, it's on a much smaller scale, thus the title.

15:30But I think the book ended up being in large part trying to answer the question or just explore the question of what does it mean to want people to look at the art that you make? And how much compromise does it involve to get people to look at it? And is there a point where that compromise is bad for you or bad for your work? And I think the conclusion I came to is just everyone has to find their own relationship to compromise. And this is the thing when I kept thinking about it of like, because I just I've just come off a run of reading this kind of novel, this kind of novel that kind of seems to follow the, oh, no, I had a kind of like a very destabilizing success story.

16:09And the ones that I'm thinking about in particular are Sophie Standing There by Meg Mason. Meg Mason had a book called Sorrow and Bliss that came out and kind of really had a similar trajectory to yours. Oh, no, that book was much bigger. That was like a monster hit, like an international. I think it's in like. It's like a recent book club. Yeah, I just interviewed her. She was really wonderful to talk to. But I think it was like in like 27 languages. And like she'd basically come off the back of touring it for like almost three years internationally. Well, right. That's the other thing in that like when you have that kind of monster literary success, it's almost like it even eclipses the thing of like having like a movie do really well because I think this just seems to maybe this is the same for movies and I just don't know enough about the promotion of movies but it just seems like you can promote a book forever because there will always be another literary festival somewhere that's like come on come on come to Jaipur why not I would love to come to Jaipur.

17:13I would love to go to Jaipur. Please. One little trip to Jaipur, please. So yeah, so that book came out in what? 2019, 18, 19, something like that? Yeah, maybe it was in the pandemic, I think, but like early pandemic, 2020, 2021, maybe. Monster, monster hit. Really funny, really great. And her second book, Sophie Standing There, has come out this year. And I was really intrigued by that Sophie Standing There was a book about a sound tech who works at a literary festival and who spends all of her time just being completely unseen and ignored by luminaries. Like there's like every living author who has like broken the New York Times bestseller list on the last 20 years is name dropped in that book in these incredibly charming and like totally inconsequential, like not really insulting, but kind of diggy.

18:07Where it'll be like, I'm talking about how George Saunders doesn't like his sort of... Brittany Mike. His Brittany Mike or something. Just like really like anodyne sort of made up anecdotes that feel very real. And I mean, maybe you got something on this when you spoke to her, but like I kept thinking, I was like, oh, this is probably how she felt. Of like, if you're, you have a monster hit and you've kind of come from, you know, been fairly unknown or whatever. And then suddenly you're being sat up next to George Saunders. you must feel like you don't belong to an extent that you do feel like you should be side stage and just micing people up and getting people bottles of water.

18:46Yeah, it was really interesting. She said someone in the audience was asking if she there's a sort of fictionalized, glamorous, bestselling author. Lilac Dunn. Lilac Dunn in the book. And I think the assumption from some audience members at the talk was that she would relate to the Lilac character and that that would have been easier to write for her. And she was like, no, I related to the uncomfortable protagonist. Yeah. And I think so many of, I'm curious about the other books that you're reading in this vein, too, are about how uncomfortable it is to go from doing something essentially in private to doing it in public.

19:22It's a book that's very much about that thing that you described, which is that the intimate relationship that a book has with a reader. Obviously, the author wants to happen, right? Like it's exciting the fact that you're like, you write down this very, very long document and it becomes this strange, like it's a phone call that gets picked up a year and a half later by someone you've never even met and you never will meet. And you get to have this like strange communion that you guys don't even know about. And then you might meet and have a lovely chat with them about it. That is, I think, one of the loveliest things about this profession.

19:57but it is also like a way for someone like the kind of the point of Sophie standing there is that there's this character who like Sophie standing there who is like in a really tough space in life and therefore allows this it's not quite like a misery narrative but it's like allows this character to completely be her imaginary friend Yes, I just think between like a first book and a second book you just get smacked in the face it's like kind of any relationship You enter into it with this fantasy of control that you'll only reveal what you want to reveal. You get to express yourself and be understood exactly as you are.

20:35And what happens in any relationship, whether it's like with the book you made and a reader or in life, people see things that you didn't know were in there. People misunderstand you. People learn things about you that you didn't want to reveal. and I guess it's just the profoundly vulnerable experience of being known by anyone in any capacity and you have to wrestle with that in another book because you're just like, oh no. Oh no. The fantasy of control has been punctured once again. Not again. Because I think a lot of people write because it feels like a place where you might be able to have control.

21:11And so to realize that even in your private writing practice you also don't have control over how vulnerable you are, how you're seen or what comes out, It's like, that's a real bitch. While we're on this, something that really, and I brought it in today, is my favorite Sally Rooney book. It's my favorite too. Right? I think everyone who is a writer, it's their favorite Sally Rooney book because it's Beautiful World, Where Are You? And I remember when it came out first, there was all these criticisms that, you know, so much of the book was just two friends emailing each other about the collapse of the Bronze Age.

21:45My dream. All of our dreams. And that everyone I remember was complaining about these emails. And I thought kind of, because that was the sort of reception, I sort of avoided it for a while. And then picked it up about a year ago. I was like, oh, this is incredible. Because I think there is no better person to explore that kind of fame than a novelist, right? Because you just have hundreds of, like thousands of words to explore it across. And what she does, what Sally Rooney does across this novel is that she kind of meets her critics right in the eye. about the kind of the idea that her characters are self-insert characters because so many of them are sort of like Trinity geniuses or whatever.

22:28And she's like, yeah, maybe I will do a self-insert character. Maybe I will put a novelist in here who is, for some reason, the most famous novelist in the world, even though she doesn't want to be.

22:41Maybe I'm just going to say how much is in my bank account in the book. Which I think is so cool. It was quite cool. I found it very cool. I found everything about it so cool. And the smartest thing that she did with that as well is that is doing this kind of correspondence thing where she has this character, Alice, who is like Sally Rooney famous, and then Eileen, who is, you know, kind of a stand-in for the every friend, really, which is like a person you grew up with who also works in the arts and is trying very hard to make rent and has a limited amount of capacity or a sympathy for you being the most famous girl in the world.

23:20Yeah. So I thought we could read some of their correspondence today. I love that. Yay. Do you want to be Alice or do you want to be Eileen? Oh, God. You pick. I think you should be Alice. Okay. Every day I wonder why my life has turned out this way. I can't believe I have to tolerate these things, having articles written about me and seeing my photograph on the internet and reading comments about myself. When I put it like that, I think, that's it? And so what? But the fact is, although it's nothing, it makes me miserable, and I don't want to live this kind of life. When I submitted the first book, I just wanted to make enough money to finish the next one.

23:55I never advertised myself as a psychologically robust person, capable of withstanding extensive public inquiries into my personality and upbringing. People who intentionally become famous, I mean people who, after a little taste of fame, want more and more of it, are, and I honestly believe this, deeply psychologically ill. The fact that we are exposed to these people everywhere in our culture, as if they are not only normal but attractive and enviable, indicates the extent of our disfiguring social disease. There is something wrong with them, and when we look at them and learn from them, something goes wrong with us.

24:28Oh my God. You should do the audiobook. She's good, you know. I'll say it. Sally Rooney's pretty good. I'm going to say that. Sally Rooney. She's got something. I think things might go all right for her. I think, you know what? She's on her way up. She's on her way up. That's even better than I, because when I first read it, I hadn't published anything. So I just thought this is very well put, but I didn't realize it was like a documentary. And what I find so funny about that is that like she wrote all that down and everyone was like, another Sally Rooney self-insert, we see you kind of thing.

25:13And no one was like, seems like she's not doing very well. Like, I mean, I don't want to dismiss her by thinking that she is sort of a memoiric writer because I don't think she is. And my personal sort of theory of this is that I think she's probably imagining it like, oh, what if I had to do all this and I was alone? Because that character is so alone in the novel. But I want to read the response from Eileen. Dear Alice, when you say you're going to Rome, do you mean for work? I don't want to be intrusive, but I thought you were supposed to be taking a break for a while. I wish you well on your trip, of course.

25:45I just wonder whether it's a good idea to start doing public events again so soon. If you find it cathartic to write me astronic messages about the publishing world, where you say everyone you know is bloodthirsty and wants to kill you or fuck you to death, by all means, continue to write them. No doubt you have met evil people through your work, though I suspect you've met a lot of boring, ethically average people as well. I'm not denying you're in pain, by the way. I know you are. And that's why I'm surprised you're subjecting yourself to all this again. Are you flying from Dublin? We could try to see each other before your flight, if so.

26:17I didn't think I was in a bad mood sitting down to write this, but maybe I am. I'm not trying to make you feel that your horrible life is in fact a privilege, although by any reasonable definition it very literally is.

26:32Okay, I make about 20k a year and pay two thirds of that in rent for the opportunity to live in a tiny apartment with people who dislike me. And you make about 200 ,000 euro a year, question mark, and live alone in a gigantic country house. But for all that, I don't think I would enjoy your life any more than you do. Doing anything, I think, in public that goes even remotely well will make you behave like a freak. Like it will have you sitting in the back of a cab listening to You're On Your Own, Kid by Taylor Swift. Oh, too true, babe. As if that's relevant to your life at all. As if the most famous woman in the world writing about what it's like to be her is like, obviously, that is Taylor Swift's great gift.

27:16But she can make you feel like it's probably you too. Yeah. But her friend is right to use the word histrionic. It's just so brilliant to like lay out why it is miserable to be Sally Rooney famous in one chapter. And then in the following chapter be like, shut up, get a grip. It is so, it is genius. Yeah. Yeah. And that paradox of like everyone's problems are their own problems and it makes them no less real to you, except that they are fake. And what's interesting about that is that like Beautiful World, Where Are You isn't even technically a second novel. It's a third novel. But like I think because conversations with friends and normal people, in my head they came out so quickly in one after another.

27:56I think they did. And Normal People was a very big book. And then the TV show during COVID just launched her and the previous book into such a stratospheric, crazy place. Yeah. That this became the only thing she could possibly follow up with. Yeah. I'm so glad she did. Yeah, I mean, I'm going to reread it, like, tonight.

28:23Whoever said good things come to those who wait never shopped Black Friday early at Lowe's. Right now, get up to 50 % off select major appliances. Plus, get free delivery, free haul-away, and free basic installation and parts when you spend$896 or more on select major appliances. Shop Black Friday early in-store and online now at Lowe's. Valid through 12-2 while supplies last. Selection varies by location. See associate at lowes.com for details. Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, email, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer.

28:59With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at go.gle slash workspace with Gemini. That's go.gle slash workspace with Gemini. What other follow ups have you been reading or second, you know, second dish books? Well, one book that I like only really I was able to understand once we put this lens on it was The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro.

29:44So once again, this is a third novel rather than a second. But I think his first novel was The Pale View of Hills, which is very short. It's almost like a novella. His second novel was The Remains of the Day, which is like one of the greatest novels ever written. Like probably. Probably. And I think about him all the time because he wrote that novel in Sydenham, which is, you know, in the street very near where I live. And like 20, 30 years ago, when he's writing Remains of the Day and he just, you know, was raising his small family and writing about like a posh butler. And then suddenly he wins the Nobel Prize for Literature and is the most famous man in the world.

30:20And obviously the question is, well, what the hell are you going to write next? Is it going to be another thing about butlers? Is it going to be another thing about British upper society? and everyone's like losing their shit. They're like, wow, can you imagine that this guy who was born in Japan, he's able to completely skewer the upper classes in the 1930s. Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. And then what he writes is a 500 page book that's like basically completely non-linear and has no logic in it whatsoever. But what it begins with is like this man who is, I think, a concert pianist and he shows up to a town, an unspecified, like what feels like a Grand Budapest hotel type of town, like a non-Europe subspace, you know, kind of like nowhere in particular, but everywhere in general.

31:09And everyone keeps telling him that he must visit the old town because it's so beautiful and you must go into the old cafe and it's like all very like generic but specific at the same time. And he just keeps getting this sense that like, first of all, he can't remember why he's there. and people keep apologizing to him and being incredibly obsequious to him but also very demanding of his time. Can I read you a tiny bit? I won't be reading constantly. No, this is great. Being read to is like one of the greatest pleasures on this earth. It's so romantic. Yeah. I think. It can be for friends too.

31:45It can be. Yeah, but in the kind of like a capital R romantic. It's very, very romantic. It's aesthetically romantic. So this is he just like, yeah, he just wakes up in his hotel room in the second day and it's like he's getting a phone call and he's like hung over and he's just like folds over the phone and this is the voice on the other end of the phone. Mr Ryder, we're so extremely pleased to have you with us at last. You're very welcome here. Now, sir, if you aren't too busy just now, I would very much like at least to greet you face to face, extend to you my personal welcome to our town and to this hotel.

32:17That's very kind of you, I said, but just now I'm taking a short nap. A short nap? There was a flash of irritation in his voice. The next moment, the geniality had returned completely. Why, of course, of course, you must be very tired. You've come such a long way. So then, let us say, whenever you're ready. I look forward to meeting you, Mr. Hoffman. No doubt I'll be down before long. Well, please come absolutely in your own time. For my part, I shall continue to wait here. That is, down here in the lobby, however long you care to take. So please, just don't hurry at all. I thought about this for a moment.

32:48Then I said, but Mr. Hoffman you must have many things to do true this is the busiest part of my day but for you Mr. Ryder I will happily wait here as long as necessary and it's just like it's like a lot of like very strange conversations like that of these people who are trying to make his life very comfortable and at the same time making him deeply uncomfortable and I was like oh you just wrote Remains of the Day

33:14I read a really wonderful substack essay by Sophie McIntosh She was a great sub stack. Oh, yeah, she's great. And a series of fantastic books. But she was writing about permanence, which is her most recent book that I also adored. And she said that whatever you're writing has to have something of the engine of your life at that time in it. Yeah. And I think that's very true. And so if you've been spending the last two years promoting something that you've made, being treated in an unusual way from your norm, let's say. Or the norm for any human. Yeah. And that you're flown into a random hotel and like everyone's desperate to sort of meet you.

33:53But then they seem to want something from you and you don't really know why. And so that, you know, that becomes sort of the engine of you. You see a lot with stand up comedians who get really big doing stand up about relatable things like dating and flat shares and, you know, like their their horrendous job that they hate or whatever. And then they get really successful. And their next special is like about how they had a funny interaction with Tom Cruise at the Emmys. Yes. Sometimes that really works and sometimes the engine feels a little bit weak. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I had this when I was in L.A.

34:27lately. I had a free night and I went to the Largo, which is like a famous comedy venue. And they had like a bunch of people come. It was like a, yeah, it was like everyone did 10 minutes kind of show, but like quite established comedians. So there was like always a chance of seeing someone very famous. And one of the very famous people who got brought up was none other than Judd Apatow. Right. And like that it was exactly that. It was just him being like, it's crazy the way my life has turned out. The other day I saw Steve Martin on a yacht. You're like, I guess that's funny. And it's so strange because like I can love that Sally Rooney, the whole bit of her being like, it's crazy to be this famous.

35:08I can love Keziu Ishiguro, you know, making this kind of extended private joke about it in that book, about what it's like to be very famous. But then for some reason, when Judd Apatow comes right out and says, it's weird that I saw Steve Martin on a yacht, I'm like, get it away. OK, I have one more in this category of writers trying to talk about what it's like to be famous. And it's from my problematic king, Bredy Stinellis. What is your experience with Bredy Stinellis? Very minimal. OK. I haven't got there yet, basically. Yeah, well, that's and you probably at this point, you probably never will.

35:44I only got to Martin Amis last year and we're having a fantastic time. Yeah, I mean, he's good fun. What's interesting about, I think, Brett Easton Ellis is that like that kind of literary fame is extremely rare. I was going to say, actually, I felt an extreme urge while we've been talking about this to clarify that I am not on a level with any of these people. And it takes very... Yeah, it's Sally Rooney, it's Kazira Shigur, it's Monica Heise. It just takes so little for it to be destabilizing. If you consider like before you put something out, no one has ever come up to you in the street and known your name and said something personal to you.

36:21And then in a month, three people do. That is a huge change. It's a three times increase in that happening. And it feels very destabilizing, even though actually, and to be very clear, again, I'm not actually, do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, this is not, I feel like it sounds like I think I'm Britney Spears or something. And I definitely don't. I just think. I'm always saying that. Going from any level of private to any level of public. Yeah. I think the experience, weirdly, is sort of similar, no matter what. I think so. Which is how you end up with people who are like sort of feeling harassed within like a micro scene.

37:03I mean, there's a bit in Small Pond about that, actually, about like how there's like a top gondolier in Venice, probably, that everyone knows all the gossip about and looks to and kind of thinks he's gotten too big for his britches. Like somewhere in England, there's like the fastest puzzle completer in the country. And they are known within the puzzle community. Oh, yeah. I think about this all the time. And they feel probably like they could be listening to Taylor Swift's You're On Your Own Kid in the back of a cab thinking like heavy as the head, you know. Heavy as the head. And I think it takes very little for you to feel something unusual.

37:38You know, I think about this all the time because whenever two of my older siblings, who I mentioned at the top of the podcast, they're both working car dealerships in Cork. And like the thing about working at a car dealership is that people take a really long time to buy their cars usually. Generally, they come back two or three times and they have like a couple of meetings with the car finance person. So they're like weirdly in the dealership a lot. And they do develop like parasocial relationships. And I've seen those parasocial relationships with my siblings. Like I've been walking through Cork with my eldest brother.

38:09Like he's Don Carleone in The Godfather Part 2. People are like magnanimously patting him. It's very odd. And I remember being at the gym with my sister and her being like, oh, God, one of these guys just keeps coming. And so in terms of, yeah, there is a top gondolier in Venice and there is like a parasociality to almost any kind of public facing job. And like I do think it's fascinating about like how whether it's you're on your own kid or Sally Rooney talking about like the most massive literary celebrity it's possible for a person to have. If anyone's had that kind of experience, it's a little kind of like that.

38:51Maybe this isn't about second novels. Maybe this is just about like very small portions of fame. Yeah, I think it's about being looked at at all, being seen, which then means it's about vulnerability. Which everything is. So I'm just going to read an extract from Lunar Park by Brady Snellis. This came after American Psycho. Okay. What's left to say about American Psycho that hasn't already been said? and I feel no need to go into great detail about it here. For those who weren't in the room at the time, here's the Cliff Notes version. I wrote a novel about a young, wealthy, alienated Wall Street yuppie named Patrick Bateman, who also happened to be a serial killer filled with vast apathy during the height of the Reagan 80s.

39:28The novel was pornographic and extremely violent and so much so that my publishers, Simon & Schuster, refused the book on grounds of taste, forfeiting a mid-six-figure advance. Sony Meta, the head of Nop, snapped with the rights and even before its publication, the controversy and scandal the novel achieved was enormous. I did no press because it was pointless. My voice would have been drowned out by the indignant wailing. The book was accused of introducing serial killer chic to the nation. It was reviewed in the New York Times three months before publication under the headline, Do Not Buy This Book.

39:57It was the subject of a 10 ,000-word essay by Norman Mailer in Vanity Fair. It was the object of scornful editorials. There were debates on CNN. There was a feminist boycott by the National Organization of Women. And the obligatory death threats a tour was cancelled because of them. Penn and the author guilds refused to come to my rescue. I was vilified even though the book sold millions of copies and raised the fame quotient so high that my name became as recognisable as movie stars or athletes. I was taken seriously. I was a joke. I was avant-garde. I was a traditionalist. I was underrated. I was overrated.

40:27I was innocent. I was partly guilty. I had orchestrated the controversy. I wasn't capable of orchestrating anything. I was considered the most misogynist American writer in existence. I was the victim of the burgeoning culture of the politically correct. The debates raged on and on and not even the Gulf War in the spring of 1991 could distract the public's fear and worry and fascination from Patrick Bateman and his twisted life. I made more money than I knew what to do with. It was the year of being hated. And what I really like about Lunar Park as a novel is that like, actually, I think maybe Imperial Bedrooms may have come after American Psycho.

41:02But it is this idea that like he starts with this 100 page thing of being like, here's what it's been like to be Bradley Stinellis so far. I'm addicted to drugs. And everyone hates me unless the people who are making money off me, in which case I quite enjoy them sometimes. and then it goes into this fictional kind of Stephen King story where Patrick Bateman sort of arrives in this small town that Brady Stenelis is trying to make himself a new in and then just keeps doing these copycat murders or whatever. It's quite schlocky. It's very much a horror Stephen King type novel but it just keeps bringing me back to this idea of authors who can't outrun their creations and that being like a real symptom of that second novel syndrome thing.

41:53I do think the urge is to like get your head out of your own ass. You know what I mean? Like I found after Really Good Actually because you do a year of interviews and particularly with the debut thing, it's very focused on your autobiography and your personality and what things are quote unquote true about the book that you wrote, which things were sort of drawn from life. And you spend so much time talking about yourself and your personal history and your emotions that like you can see yourself becoming a bad conversationalist because you're used to it. You're like, yeah, ask me questions. That's what I'm here for.

42:33It's very bad. That's so true. That is definitely part of the wider thing of people going insane, I think. Of people just like... I started instead... I do morning pages most days and I made a rule for my morning pages around the time that I put the paper back out for Really Good Actually, that I wasn't allowed to write about myself or my feelings. I could only write about things that I had seen or observed or describe scenarios and dynamics, but I was trying to avoid basically the eye. Yeah. And it was such a relief, actually, because I was just like, I don't care what this bitch thinks anymore.

43:12It's like the getting the head out of your own ass thing. But also, seemingly, as we've seen from our extracts today, really hard to do. It's really hard to do. And I think in a way you have to like write through it. You know, what all of those writers in all of those excerpts are trying to do, I think, is be like this is. And that's kind of the premise of Morning Pages is that you spew out everything that is holding you back from thinking about something else. And you sort of just kind of clean the pipes a bit. And I kind of think in a way some of the urge in these books is to just be like, I have to drain the radiators.

43:48Otherwise, it's going to be clanking around in the background of every other thing that I write. And then once it's out, you can write intrametso. Exactly. So a lot of the novels I've been talking about today have been specifically about things that follow up the big thing and specifically deal with the literary fame. But are there novels that you think have completely avoided that and have just like slid on to the next thing without being burdened by it? Yeah, I think Nisha Dolan and Megan Nolan both followed up big debuts with really interesting, very different books. Particularly, I loved The Happy Couple by Nisha Dolan.

44:28Exciting Times was great. It was, you know, sardonic. There was something of the time in it, I guess. In terms of like, I mean, really, it actually shares a lot of DNA with that kind of book as well. And from these young women as well. They're all of a piece of the slightly. These self-destructive, detached young women. Yeah. And then The Happy Couple was a big sort of multi-perspective group novel about quite a chaotic couple and an extremely chaotic friend group getting ready for the couple to get married and whether or not they would do it. and they've all kind of been secretly shagging each other.

45:07And it was fantastic and really, it felt really alive. I haven't read The Happy Couple, but I love Nisha Dolan. Yeah, I do too. I've never met her, but I love reading her sub stack. And I think what you can really get from her, and to be fair, like something I really credit a lot of my fellow country women as writers is that they are very good at keeping this job in perspective. Like you can tell from Nisha Dolan that she's like, I don't know, translating Proust and like Anna Flotilla to Israel. Do you know what I mean? And when she ever talked, like she's literally doing those things. I'm not being dismissive.

45:44Like she is like trying to fix both Proust and the world at large. And like the, I'm really not trying to be facetious. I'm in huge awe of her. I remember reading something that she wrote in her substack that was essentially like, my characters are not my babies and they're not my friends. They are sentences I write in order to get better at writing sentences. And I find that kind of rock and roll. Yeah. To not pretend like you're like driving around an imaginary clown car of your made up imaginary friends and just be like, this is my job. And actually, I'm interested in other things as well. Yeah.

46:19I think it's a really cool move to do something that's a totally different thing to your first book, especially if your first book was quite a big one. It was just such an exciting follow up, I thought. And then I was really annoyed when I was reading the reviews because they all kept being like, difficult second novel. How does it match up to the first novel? And I'm like, it's none of your business. It's a new novel. It's none of your business. It exists totally separately. Obviously, it is your business a little bit if you're a literary critic. But I also think it doesn't make a lot of sense to me that the debut gets to be read kind of on its own terms and the second book has to be read.

46:58In context. In context only of the debut. yeah that's one way to look at it but it's it's certainly not the most interesting way the second novels that i am fascinated by are the ones where like a decade or more has passed because first of all it gives me a reassuring sense of like oh wow your book did so well that you didn't have to work like get your royalty statements and like the you know donna tar is obviously a very famous example of that but another quite famous example and probably you know more in my reading wheelhouse than yours is Susanna Clarke. Are you familiar with her at all? Piranesi?

47:33Yes. She wrote like a 600 page fantasy novel that is now a classic of the genre called Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell. And what that was, was a like a period novel written very much like a Dickens piece. But I'm set during the Napoleonic Wars in a world where magic is real. And it's like just another kind of tool that the military is using. But it's also like a Victorian, a classic Victorian England book. Sounds wicked. It rocks. It's so good. She writes that book. It's an enormous hit right away. It's her first novel. It's enormous. It's both physically enormous and like, you know, completely breaks fantasy in half.

48:12It does so well and like converts so many people to the genre for the first time and all that. And then she tours it so extensively. And I'm a little fuzzy on the details here because I think she has written kind of intentionally, vaguely about it as well. She taught it so extensively that she kind of gets incredibly ill. She develops a chronic illness. I think something in the kind of ME or something like that. And basically can't get out of bed for 10 years. She kind of writes about something. Famesick. Kind of fame sick, right? She has the fantasy novelist version of fame sick. And she kind of writes about something snapping or breaking within her that she's just unable to repair.

48:55God. And then she finally comes back after whatever number of years with this very small little book called Piranesi, which ends up winning a bunch of awards and is a modern classic in its own right. But what that is, is like it's a very kind of surreal story about this kind of man who's stuck in this. He calls it the house. And it's just this these huge marble hallways that are some of them are tidal and just sort of these oceans kind of wash through them. And like he kind of lives on the seaweed and that washes in and he watches the birds and he gets very attuned to nature. And then people start bleeding through from our world and it becomes a bit more of a mystery.

49:33but like when I read her writing on that she was like yeah I was I was in bed for 10 years essentially I was watching the birds on the trees outside my window and like reassuring myself that life was still happening outside of like human society and I just found that really like beautiful but hard you know yeah but again I guess that's like going back to what Sophie McIntosh was saying about the engine of your life yeah the engine of your life is still there and taking a step away from the crazy world of touring. If she hadn't done that, then the second book might have been more about that. Yeah.

50:08Yeah, it's hard to escape the pull to include the things that are happening to you in your work, not in an autobiographical sense, but in what you are occupied by. Yeah, in the mood of your life. It's really difficult because it's hard to talk about it, particularly when you're in quite a formulaic interviewing position, like if you're on a stage at a festival or something like that, where if you admit to this being in something being autobiographical, they'll assume that like the sister in the novel is your sister in real life or whatever or a quiv. My mom thinks I had a threesome in the bathroom at a wedding because Maggie does that in Really Good Actually.

50:45And I would never do that in a bathroom. I was looking at you. I was like, is this Monica? Monica's ass speaking. you're right like i'm i'm writing a sequel right now which is part of the inspiration for this season's theme and sequels are always difficult but i you know it is a fantasy novel it is ya it is like characters who bear absolutely no resemblance to my life whatsoever in that one of them is trying to look sort of be a in classic y style spearheading revolution and I'm finding it really difficult and I only realised the other day when I'm like 60 ,000 words into it that this is the first novel I've written after making a TV show where I moved to Ireland for six months by myself and had to be the executive producer of a show every day a role that I didn't know how to do but kind of had to pretend like I did it's a classic fake it till you make it role in like it's a, you know, because you've also done this, like a position of strength you have to occupy even though you don't necessarily believe in your own abilities to do it, but you do believe in the team around you.

52:01And now this kind of story about this young person leading a revolution is like, oh, this is what it's like to try and executively produce a TV show when you don't have the skill set to do it. And so it's just about that. And like, even though I'm talking about something completely far-fetched and far-flung, like I'm like, oh, oh, actually it's reassuring now that I understand where the me is in this, you know? That's really interesting. Yeah. Discovering the part of it that's like true to you. Yeah. In the process of writing it. I mean, I just, yeah, I just think there's no escaping it. And the real dream is to just be doing enough things that aren't engaging with your own work in public that you have other things to write about.

52:43Do you know what I mean? But then it's like, it's an industry that loves success because it has so few of them. Like, if you really think about it, there are like, what, three publishing success stories a year and half of them are just sort of like fan fiction with the serial number sewn off. Do you know what I mean? Like, let's be real. And so when there is like a huge, like contemporary literary fiction phenomenon, because no one knows how to repeat these things, you know, they just kind of happen, really. and people get so excited that they do just want, you know, authors are incredibly pressured to simply put more and more of themselves out there.

53:17I've seen it happen to so many people where they are convinced into the need for them to sell off their personal lives piecemeal in a way that gradually erodes their work. Well, this is why I'm so grateful to you for holding it down in a world of the video podcast medium. Thank you. Where we're just sitting here visually in private right now And ain't nobody going to know how clapped out we both look. This is sort of private for us. And we're sharing sort of within the boundaries. That's really nice. Thanks. What was so interesting when I started researching this subject to sort of wrap up is that like so many of these novels, when we started talking about second novel syndrome and I had this kind of long list of books in my head that I wanted to either visit or revisit or whatever.

54:02I found out that actually most of them weren't second novels, right? Like actually even Meg Mason, like Sorrow and Bliss was a huge hit. But that was actually her second novel. She had another novel that had come before that. Kazuyo Shiguro similarly. Obviously Sally Rooney. And it made me think actually that people's lives and their careers and good artistic lives and good artistic careers. They are kind of in this constant cycle of life and death and rebirth. Like what happened? And you see this with actors, you see this with movies, you see it like someone has a big thing and there is like a huge, you know, a huge moment for them or whatever.

54:42And then they have to do something else. It's an indie project. It's a whatever. It's less successful. Then their fame contracts for a little while or their success contracts for a little while. And they're like a secondhand embarrassment kind of. You get this with starlets a lot. Like, you know, whenever like Jennifer Lawrence or somebody who's like obviously incredibly famous and beloved puts out a movie that's like a three. And then there's a kind of a sense, a contracting societal public sense of embarrassment for her because you're like, we remember American Hustle and that was really good.

55:17And now you must feel embarrassed because this is kind of bad. and then you actually step back from artistic lives that you admire and you realize that all of them have this sense of growth and then contraction and growth and contraction and actually that's what gives careers an art texture because people are constantly recovering from whatever the last thing was. I think that's so right. I think there's like an action and a reaction and then after you've got the reaction out of the way you can take new action and so a second book I think is always a reaction either away or toward what's happened with the first one.

55:51And that's what makes me feel very excited about, you know, having done the debut, which has so much pressure around it in one way, and the second book, which has significant pressure in another way. It does feel like after you've done those two, you sort of put both feet down and are like, I'm staying actually and I will be continuing to produce books. And the third one maybe will be a lot freer. Yeah. And then like, if you're anything like Toni Morrison, like she had and I think I am I think you are like Toni Morrison and I'm always saying that I am yeah you know what I think you know who's the next Toni Morrison no I was I was reading about her today because she is one of those people whose fame is always brought up whenever I see these things that are like oh you know who published their first novel at 40 or whatever Toni Morrison and look she's famous right and all you have to do is be one of the greatest geniuses that's ever worked just be one of the greatest minds who's ever lived really I was kind of looking through her reviews because it's like I have to remember that like this Nobel Prize winning Pulitzer Prize winning like now dead genius with this towering career that like I studied at university and found to be incredibly life changing was just somebody who was publishing book to book while trying to feed their family and have a life.

57:08right and like you see her first book it's like yeah people are excited then song of solomon comes out people go crazy then tar baby comes out people are like we like the last one but this lady's a little weird basically is like and the kind of thing of like okay well is it a ghost story or isn't it is it mystic is magic real or isn't it tony kind of thing and then she comes back with beloved and she's like yeah magic is absolutely real and so are ghosts and then she just builds and builds and builds and what she has is this empire where magic is also real and ghosts and she's also like the, you know, the greatest fiction writer of that century probably, right?

57:49And that makes me just feel great because I think we just celebrate these moments of genius when it actually is people working very hard for 20 to 30 to 40 years with no real sense of what they're doing except for what they're interested in. yeah of just whatever the engine is at that time yeah to conclude

58:12I really like talking about books because I know it seems like that all I think about is like sort of failed Julia Roberts uh properties from the mid-90s but actually this is what I'm thinking about most of the time so Monica thanks for so much so much for coming in to talk to me about this thank you so much for having me on this is the first place I've talked about small pond it's I know. And people are going to be so angry with me that Small Pond isn't actually out until next year. Yes. Nay, the summer of next year. June 8th. But thank you for coming here so early. It's kind of nice to capture you in this moment before it's a huge success again.

58:50Before you get all of those cranky reviews about second novels. Exactly. You can listen to this back and remember that careers are long and so is this friendship. Thank you for having me. Thanks, Mom.

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