'The God of the Woods' novelist Liz Moore describes the rare 'flow state' of writing

DAVE: [00:00:00] This is Fresh Air, I'm Dave Davies. Our guest today, writer Liz Moore, is on something of a roll. Her last two novels were national bestsellers. One, Long Bright River, a thriller about a policewoman patrolling a troubled Philadelphia neighborhood where her drug-using sister is a sex worker, was made into an eight-part TV series on Peacock. Moore was an executive producer, co-creator, and co-writer of the series. And its star, Amanda Seyfried, has earned a Golden Globe nomination for her performance. Moore's latest bestseller, The God of the Woods, is set in a remote children's camp in the Adirondacks, where a young camper goes mysteriously missing. Our book critic Maureen Corrigan said when she read it, quote, I was so thoroughly submerged in a rich fictional world that for hours I barely came up for air. Netflix has announced it will produce a limited TV series based on The God Of words. Moore's novels show quite a range of subjects. The central character in an earlier novel, titled Heft, is a 450-pound shut-in in Brooklyn who longs for human connection. Liz Moore won the 2014 Rome Prize in Literature, and her two most recent books were on Barack Obama's lists of recommended reading. Liz Moore lives with her family in Philadelphia, where fresh air is produced, and she directs Temple University's Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing. This is Moore, welcome to Fresh Air. [00:01:26][85.8]
LIZ MOORE: [00:01:26] Thank you, Dave. I'm so happy to be here. [00:01:28][1.6]
DAVE: [00:01:29] Let's talk about Longbright River. This is set in this Philadelphia neighborhood, Kensington, which has gotten some national attention. It's become a regional center for drug users just because it was a place where people learned they could score drugs, they could use drugs, or deal drugs, and in some cases, over the years, people have been living on sidewalks and in abandoned houses, and so it's been a big issue in a lot of ways. The other thing I'll just note about the neighborhood is that there's an elevated subway train. That runs over Kensington Avenue, which is sort of the spine of the neighborhood, so that even in the daylight, it's that whole area, which is a business area, is kind of cast into shadow, gives it a sort of Dickensian feel. So what made you want to make this the setting for a book? [00:02:14][45.7]
LIZ MOORE: [00:02:15] I am not from Philadelphia. I grew up in Massachusetts. I lived in New York for a time. My husband is from this area. When we arrived here together in 2009, I was looking for community and I was for writing projects and a photographer who was at the time making portraits of abandoned homes in the city of Philadelphia. His name is Jeffrey Stockbridge. Invited me to go with him to interview some of the residents of Kensington that he was making portraits of. This was a long time ago and so Kensington itself was not receiving the national attention that it now receives. So when I went there I was kind of naive and I was a little bit unprepared for what I would see, but what I was immediately struck by was how much the neighborhood had been failed in various ways in terms of, you know, resources that the city or the state. Could offer it, and also just the incredibly moving and interesting and complex conversations I had with the people I was interviewing at the time. That became a photo essay, and I rarely do non-fiction writing, but it was actually non-fiction writing that caused me to take an interest in the neighborhood in a fictional way. My own family has a long history of addiction. I was kind of emotionally drawn back to the neighborhood over and over again because of that. I began doing community work with St. Francis in running free writing workshops at a women's day shelter there. And although it was not active research, it functioned as the backdrop of like life experience that I had in Kensington that ultimately formed the setting. [00:03:59][103.4]
DAVE: [00:04:00] There are two sisters who are at the heart of this story. Tell us about them. [00:04:03][3.1]
LIZ MOORE: [00:04:04] So Mickey is a patrol officer with the Philadelphia Police Department. And from the opening of the novel, she talks about how she's really not cut out for police work. She describes herself as not the first officer to put her life on the line. I wanted to make her a very kind of a fish out of water character, which I love to do. Her sister, Casey, has always been troubled. The two sisters came out of the same family. Raised by a grandmother, because they lost their own mother to overdose. [00:04:36][32.6]
DAVE: [00:04:37] Casey's just a little bit younger then. [00:04:38][1.1]
LIZ MOORE: [00:04:39] Casey's a little younger than Mickey, and they grow up incredibly close, but at the start of the novel, they are estranged by virtue of the very different paths that their lives have taken. Mickey self-identifies as kind of the good sister who's always made all the right choices, and she has cast Casey into this role of being the quote unquote bad sister, but those ideas become very complicated over the course of the normal without giving too much away. [00:05:03][24.2]
DAVE: [00:05:04] Right. We can say that Casey is a regular drug user and a sex worker on Kensington Avenue, right? [00:05:10][6.2]
LIZ MOORE: [00:05:10] Yep, Casey suffers from substance use disorder. She does survival sex work. She goes missing at the same time that a string of homicides is occurring in the neighborhood of Kensington. And although Mickey is used to seeing her sister absent from the streets for long periods of time, while, for example, she's trying to get into recovery. The timing of this particular disappearance alarms Mickey and she decides to kind of investigate off the job as well. [00:05:42][31.8]
DAVE: [00:05:44] So there's a reading I'd like you to share with us. And this is, it's in the voice of Mickey, the sister who is a police officer and she's worried about her sister who's been missing. And she goes to see their grandmother who she refers to as G. They grew up in poverty because their mother died when they were very, very young. She also suffered from addiction, right? I'll also note that Mickey has a son, Thomas, who is... Four years old in the book. And so that is, we hear a reference to that in the reading. [00:06:17][32.7]
LIZ MOORE: [00:06:19] On the way home, I called G. We speak only rarely these days. We see each other even less. When Thomas was born, I made the decision to give him an entirely different sort of upbringing than the one I experienced. And this means avoiding G, avoiding all the O'Briens really, as much as possible. Begrudgingly, out of some unshakable sense of family obligation, I performed the perfunctory ritual of bringing Thomas to visit G sometime around Christmas. And I phoned her once in a while to make sure she's still alive. Although she complains about it on occasion, I don't think she's actually bothered by her absence. She never calls me. She never offers any help with Thomas, though she's able-bodied enough to work her catering job all right, and to put in her hours at Thriftway, too. Lately, I've developed the conviction that if I stopped contacting her, we'd never speak again. Go ahead, says G, after several rings, the same way she always answers the phone. It's me, I say, and G says. Mickey, I say. Oh, says G, didn't recognize your voice. I pause, letting the implication settle. The perennial guilt trip, there it is. I was just wondering, I said, whether you'd heard from Casey lately. Why do you care, says, G, warily. No reason, I says. Nope, says she, you know I steer clear. You know her don't fly with me. I steer her clear, she says again, just for emphasis. All right, I, say, will you tell me if you hear from her? What are you up to, says G, suspicious. You'd stay away too, says G, if you knew what was good for you. After a brief pause, G says, I know you do, reassured. How's my baby, says G, changing the subject. She has always been kinder to Thomas than she ever was to us. She spoils him when she sees him, produces from her purse mountains of ancient, half-melted candy that she unwraps and feeds him with her hands. I see in these small charities an echo of the way she must have been with her own daughter, our mother, Lisa. He's very fresh these days, I say. Not meaning it. You stop, says G. Very faintly at last, I hear a smile in her voice. You stop that. Don't talk about my boy like that. He is, I say. I wait. There is still a part of me that hopes that G will come around first, that she'll ask me to bring Thomas by, that she will offer to babysit, that she asked to come see our new place. Anything else, G says at last? No, I think that's it. Before I can say anything further, she's hung up the phone. [00:08:59][160.6]
DAVE: [00:09:01] You know, what strikes me about that is the economy of the writing. I mean, you get this very, very vivid sense of this woman, her resentment, her bitterness about the deal life has dealt her. But it's barely a page. You have a lot of short chapters. And I wonder, you know, so many people say they rip through your books. People tell me they read that book in a weekend. I've felt the same experience. Is this conscious to you? I mean do you work on getting things done concisely yet so dramatically? [00:09:29][27.6]
LIZ MOORE: [00:09:30] I think a huge part of it is the amount of writing that I do that never sees the published book. I write and write and usually it's stuff that I know won't ultimately be published, but I really get to know my characters through the hours and hours and pages and pages of writing I do before actually writing the two-page scene that makes it into the book. So sometimes I describe my writing process like. A tree where I know roughly, I know the place the book will be set, I know the main characters within the book, and I know only the inciting incident or the initial problem. And I talk about this a lot in my teaching practice, too. Like, I know those three things. I write in a given direction, which functions kind of like the trunk of the tree. But after the trunk is formed, I have to send my characters out on different branches, to put them into situations that... May or may not feel realistic for them. And if I'm finding that a situation doesn't feel realistic to them, then I lop that branch off. I return to what I know. I grow another branch in a different direction. So, you know, the way that I conceived of G changed a little bit from start to finish. And that's even more true of the character of Mickey. I initially conceived her as a history teacher in an early draft of this book. She was not actually a police officer. But I decided that for the sake of story, it would make more sense. To make her a complete foil for her sister, to make on the quote unquote right side of the law and her sister on the wrong side of law. And then suddenly I was writing a police officer character. [00:11:11][100.4]
DAVE: [00:11:11] So when you're writing a book, you have all these branches which exist in what, dozens of word documents on your computer. [00:11:16][4.6]
LIZ MOORE: [00:11:17] Hundreds. Yeah, I have hundreds of word documents for every book that I write, and they all have weird names like, you know, G Caterer. If I've made G a caterer in one draft, then I might do a Save As and do, you know, Longbright River G Bank Teller, or whatever it is, you know. I usually name the file with whatever the most obvious changes that I've [00:11:43][25.6]
DAVE: [00:11:44] The book was made into a series on Peacock, which your co-creator, co-writer, executive producer for, it was shot in Brooklyn, although it looks a lot like Kensington, I mean, it really does. I imagine it is hard for a writer who has put such time and effort into crafting this thing to see it adapted, because, you know, it's a different medium, things are going to change, some characters change, the ending changed, how did you feel about the experience? [00:12:11][27.3]
LIZ MOORE: [00:12:12] The experience was fascinating. Team sports were something that I always felt kind of apprehensive about. And I had the same apprehension going into the making of the series, Long Bright River, because I knew that although I was the author, I wasn't the showrunner. I wouldn't have ultimate say over creative decisions, but at the same time, I would have a lot of input. And I do feel confident saying that my input was respected. And one thing that all of us agreed on, everybody who made the show, was the importance of bringing in members of the community of Kensington to set, both as consultants, on-set consultants, and off-set consultants. And also in small roles, Father Michael Duffy from St. Francis and actually played a priest, which was not a stretch for him in the series, the musician, O.T. The Real. Who has kind of made a career in Kensington, played a pretty large role, a character called Doc. And we had other musicians from Kensington. James Poiser from The Roots was our composer, one of our two composers on the series. We even brought in graffiti artists from the neighborhood to kind of tag the set and make that feel authentic. So I think if I'm, what I'm proud of in the series is making sure that members of the community had a voice within the series. Transparently, I absolutely wish it had been shot in Philadelphia. A lot of that was a budget decision that was kind of above my pay grade. And I think it would have been complex for various reasons to shoot in Kensington, but the city of Philadelphia is still a place that I hope to shoot someday. [00:14:09][116.3]
DAVE: [00:14:10] So let's talk about The God of the Woods. That's your most recent novel, which is a big bestseller and is gonna be a TV series. Yeah, it's also a mystery, but it couldn't be a more different setting than Longbright River, which is in this struggling urban neighborhood. This is set in the Adirondacks, these mountains in upstate New York. People may not be as familiar with the Adorondacks as they might in some other mountain, like the Rockies or the Green Mountains in Vermont. I've been there a couple of times. Kind of wilder, less developed, less popular. Tell us about it and what inspired you about them as a setting for a novel. [00:14:45][34.9]
LIZ MOORE: [00:14:46] Yeah, the Adirondacks are a mountain range in upstate New York, and it's really a huge swath of protected land. The Adirondeck Park was formed in the 1890s, and my family, actually, my mother's ancestors come from the Adorondacks. It became a kind of summer playground for the wealthy and a lot of wealthy dynastic American families. Quote unquote discovered it in the 1800s and built these enormous compounds that they called great camps. And so the God of the Woods centers on one of these great camps, it's fictional and the family in question is fictional. And just down the hill from the great camp is a summer camp that the family also founded from which their own 13 year old daughter goes missing. So that's sort of the setup of the book. [00:15:37][50.9]
DAVE: [00:15:37] And the interesting thing about this camp is that it's for kids, but it's not just swimming in campfires and volleyball, I mean they get survival training, they learn how to make spears for catching fish and trap small animals and skin them and cook them. And I guess the idea is that the owners of the camp, which are this wealthy family that kind of run this land preserve, see themselves as real outdoors people and want to preserve what that culture of those skills. [00:16:07][29.7]
LIZ MOORE: [00:16:08] Yeah, they do. They have this notion that they are very skillful outdoors people, but they are quite wealthy and they've been, I think, protected from criticism for too long a time. So they've become pretty myopic and they have overestimated, let's say, their ability to survive in the wilderness. Meanwhile, a nearby town called Shattuck, also a fictional town in the book, is full of working-class people who are actually required to use the skills of hunting and fishing and trapping for their survival. The wealthy family in the book, their name is the Van Laars, they have named their own great camp Self-Reliance after the Ralph Waldo Emerson essay of the same name. And the locals nearby think it's very funny because they like to point out that it was not actually the family that built the house. It was the people of Shaddock who. Rolled all the lumber on log roads and built the house and now serve the family in this kind of weird fiefdom that the family has created. [00:17:10][61.8]
DAVE: [00:17:11] So there are a lot of class issues here, and can we say that the daughter of the wealthy family goes to camp and interesting things happen, right? [00:17:20][9.6]
LIZ MOORE: [00:17:21] Yes, Barbara Van Laar is the kind of misunderstood 13-year-old black sheep of her family. She begs to go to camp, and her family at first does not want her to go, partly because although it's a camp for the children of the wealthy, they still wish to maintain a kind of divide between themselves and the campers. The family is very preoccupied by its own reputation and by optics, and they think it would be strange for them to send their own daughter to the camp. But she gets her way, she spends a summer at the camp, and toward the end of that summer, she goes missing. And so the novel opens with her counselor, Louise, noticing one morning that Barbara's bed is empty and having a sinking sensation from that realization. [00:18:04][43.7]
DAVE: [00:18:06] The title, The Guide of the Woods, tell us where it comes from, what it means. [00:18:10][3.6]
LIZ MOORE: [00:18:11] Original title of the novel was not The God of the Woods. I called it Self-Reliance for the entire time that I was writing it, up to about a year before its publication when everybody at Riverhead Books simultaneously broke the news to me that they hated the title Self- Reliance, which I don't blame them for. I think the concern was that it would sound like a self-help book. So I was sent back to my room basically to try to come up with a different title for the And often when I do that, I go through a variety of other texts published about some of the themes that crop up in my novels. So that's actually how I found the title of Long Bright River as well, which comes from a Tennyson poem called The Lotus Eaters. With The God of the Woods, I was really interested in primary sources about the Adirondacks. That's the first place I started. I entertained the title The Bark Eaters, which is what the word Adirondeck actually means, um, Ultimately, I became really, really interested in the phrase wood panic, which is the real sensation of feeling completely disoriented in the woods, which often causes people, especially children, to walk in a particular direction without knowing where they're going, which is really dangerous. And one of the phrases that comes up a lot in The God of the Woods is, when lost, sit down and yell. It's emblazoned on different buildings at the camp. It's told to the campers when they arrive. And a version of that phrase was also told to me when I was growing up in the Adirondacks. Another way to say it is hug a tree. [00:19:44][92.9]
DAVE: [00:19:45] Stay in one place and you'll be fine. Stay in [00:19:46][1.1]
LIZ MOORE: [00:19:46] stay in one place and you'll be safe. Wood Panic itself contains within it the word panic, which comes from the Greek god Pan, said to be a kind of playful trickster god who liked to make people feel lost in the woods. And it occurred to me that the phrase the god of the woods, referring to Pan, could also refer to a number of other characters in the novel, including the VanLars, who I think mistakenly. Or in a self-aggrandizing way, see themselves as the gods of their domain, I thought that's the title of the book. That's the right one. [00:20:21][35.2]
DAVE: [00:20:22] You're really good at writing. Do you enjoy it? [00:20:24][1.9]
LIZ MOORE: [00:20:26] Writing is something that I always enjoy having done. So, because I have little kids, I write my fiction almost exclusively between the hours of 5.30 and 7.30 a.m. I feel very unsettled when I don't do it. In fact, Dave, when I arrived here, you said, have you been up since 5. 30? And I said, actually, no, because my son decided to wake me up twice overnight. So I'm feeling a little off, if I'm being honest. It's a little, it's a, it a bit compulsive for me. I If I don't do it, sometimes I feel like I have a bad day. Seven days a week? No, I'm sorry, five days a week. I do it on weekdays. I do it on weekdays. [00:21:04][37.7]
DAVE: [00:21:04] So Saturday and Sunday, you're okay if you don't. [00:21:06][1.7]
LIZ MOORE: [00:21:06] I'm okay if I don't do it, but the other, the weekdays that I don t write my fiction, I feel like I've failed myself in some way. It's not, 98% of the time, writing is labor for me. 2% of time, usually at the very beginning of a book and the very end of a book, it feels like flying, it's almost a supernatural experience of being in a kind flow state where words are arriving so quickly that they bypass my brain and go straight from something to my hands that are typing. And, you know, if I didn't ever have that 2%, I might not be a writer, but it's sort of like the 2% of the time, that's what you live for as a writer is that feeling of true breakthrough of solving a problem that has felt unsolvable. And it's a gift. It's that kind of moment. [00:22:06][59.8]
DAVE: [00:22:06] Wow, perseverance is needed. It takes you about four years to finish a book, typically. And I know from reading about you that you don't work from an outline. You don't know when you start a mystery how it's going to end. You what? You create characters and see what they do. [00:22:23][16.7]
LIZ MOORE: [00:22:24] Yeah, I never pre-plan. As I said, I know people, place, and problem is the shorthand that I use with my students going in. The one compromise I make is, as I write the book, I keep a kind of simultaneous chronology running so that if I name a date, I will open up that other word document called Longbright River Timeline, and I'll say, you know, whatever, December 20th, 2006, Mickey and Casey go to the nutcracker. As children. And what that helps me to do is to very quickly have a reference for ages, if I'm jumping around in time, and also eventually to just kind of get a sense of the arc of the book. [00:23:08][44.0]
DAVE: [00:23:10] There's a moment in The God of the Woods, your most recent book, where one of the characters that we meet early and who I felt most sympathetic with, she is physically harmed by someone that the character trusts. Aware of the moment I'm referring to, I don't want to give it away, but it was painful for me to read because I liked this character so much. Is it painful for you to write? [00:23:33][23.2]
LIZ MOORE: [00:23:34] It is. That, I know the scene that you're talking about, this sounds diabolical. As a writer, when I come up with a moment that I know is correct for the book, but that does endanger a character I love in some way, my mind splits in two and half of my mind goes oh no I have to put this character through this and the other half is like oh yes this is exactly right for this book and it's a dynamic scene and it moves the story forward and actually I remember when I understood that I would have to write that scene all of a sudden I understood something about the future of the novel as well and it solved a problem for me later so it was a gift of a scene even while it was hard to write. [00:24:20][45.9]
DAVE: [00:24:21] You know, you're starting with these characters and you put a lot of time and effort into this book, years. Do you ever worry you're going to write yourself into a corner and can't get out of it? When I used to be in the newspaper business, I would, whenever I worked on a story of more than a few weeks, there would come a point where I would just hate it. I would want it out of my life. I mean, do you have this? [00:24:39][17.8]
LIZ MOORE: [00:24:40] I have never written a novel without writing myself into, like, all four corners of a room. The only thing that I take with me from novel to novel is the knowledge that I will, at least one point, probably more than one point feel that the novel is fundamentally broken and that I have to throw it out. So now when that moment arrives, which it inevitably does, I'm not scared of it. I'm just sort of like, oh there you are, I know you, I've seen you before. I am going to just have to hit my head into the wall over and over again until I bust through it in one way or another. And sometimes that means going back to the trunk of the tree and saying, what's the last thing I knew was working? And trying a different formal experiment, a different experiment of story, losing a character, creating a new character, jumping to a different point in time. If I'm, I can't put a fine, you know, I can put an exact number on it, but let's say if I'm 150 pages into a book or 200 pages into book, I'm gonna keep going. I've not gotten that far in a book without finishing it, even though it sometimes does take me four years. It usually takes me four or five years to write a book. [00:25:55][74.8]
DAVE: [00:25:56] When you're in one of those jams, are you a harder person to live with? [00:25:59][2.6]
LIZ MOORE: [00:26:00] A thousand percent. I am sorry to my whole family. I, you know, 10% of my brain is usually working out that problem. [00:26:09][9.1]
DAVE: [00:26:10] And you're a Masters of Fine Arts student at Temple. [00:26:12][1.9]
LIZ MOORE: [00:26:13] You know. [00:26:13][0.3]
DAVE: [00:26:13] Can they tell Liz is a different person than when you went through this? [00:26:16][2.4]
LIZ MOORE: [00:26:16] I don't think so. I think I'm able to compartmentalize. Teaching is very, very important to me and it actually provides a respite to me. It's a chance for me to think about somebody else's problems with their writing so that I don't t have to think of my own. And I am pretty transparent with my students about the ups and downs of my writing. For example, technology has become such an untenable thing in my life that I've had to require myself to be fully offline when writing. And so I'll bring in, you know, right now I'm writing on an ancient iPad with a detachable keyboard because I can't trust myself to even be on my laptop when I write in those morning hours. So I brought in my weird contraption that I devised in order to show my MFA students, look, this is what I'm riding on these days because I need to babysit myself. I cannot be connected to the internet in any way or I will whatever, check Instagram. [00:27:08][52.2]
DAVE: [00:27:10] I want to talk about another book of yours, Heft. It was your third novel, I think, which I read in preparation for this. I commend it to the listeners. It's really good. It's, the central character is a 450 pound man who's essentially a shut-in, can't go up his stairs, but lives his life mostly in this room. We hear his inner monolog. It's written in his voice, much of the novel. We empathize with him. In a reprinting of the book, There's a. Author Q&A in the back at which someone is interviewing you and in that you said that of all the characters you've ever written you think of Arthur, this 450 pound shut-in, as most like yourself. [00:27:49][39.6]
LIZ MOORE: [00:27:50] I think there's something about the rhythm of his voice that mimics my inner voice in certain ways. His concern about what other people think of him, his desire, he's kind of a, I want to call him a maternal figure almost in some ways, but I think a lot about how to care for others. And I identify as somebody who's like very responsible and. And I worry about other people a lot and I worry about the people I love and people I don't know. And my instinct is to take care of them, whether or not they want to be taken care of sometimes, which is another problem that I have. I think Arthur has the same instincts. I also, you know, that's another book that I wrote when I was quite young. I was in my 20s when I wrote that book. It was published in 2012. I would write Arthur differently now. [00:28:48][57.4]
DAVE: [00:28:50] Do you understand anything about how you would do it differently? [00:28:51][1.8]
LIZ MOORE: [00:28:52] What I'll say here is, I think part of the reason that I made Arthur so physically different from me is because I was afraid of exploring my own true neuroses around food and eating. And although in the years since then I have been open about the idea that Arthur reminds me of myself, at the time I thought, well, nobody will possibly conflate us because I'm going to make him a man. And I'm gonna make him, I'm going to put him in a much different body than the body that I have. You know, fiction is weird. I think these days it's become sort of accepted, even expected for the writers of fiction to be asked about the personal experiences that informed the fiction. And all of us do it and we're used to being asked. And yet, I do think all of would say there's a reason that we write fiction and not memoir. And part of that is because there's a line past which I don't necessarily feel comfortable going when I talk about my own life. And that extends also to members of my family. Because I write about addiction, a lot of people are interested in what's my own experience with addiction and what's family's experience with addiction. And I've gotten very used to saying, you know, my family has a long history of addiction, but their stories are not my stories to tell aloud and and therefore that's the phrase that I say and that's all that I will ever say. [00:30:23][90.5]
DAVE: [00:30:25] Well, one of the things I discovered in reading about your life for this interview was that when you were younger, I guess in your twenties, you were a singer-songwriter. Can we play a tune? Should we listen to one? [00:30:35][9.8]
LIZ MOORE: [00:30:35] This is going really deep into my archive and my backstory, and I have to admit that I have mixed emotions about it, but I'm gonna say yes, because I think it's kind of an important part of the story of how I started writing. So yes, the answer is yes. [00:30:52][16.6]
DAVE: [00:30:51] All right, so you did have an album called Backyards, which people can find on YouTube, that's where I found it. This is the lead track called Across America. Do you want to say anything about it before we hear some of it? [00:31:02][11.2]
LIZ MOORE: [00:31:03] No, let's listen to it first and then we can talk. And then we can talk. [00:31:04][1.8]
DAVE: [00:31:05] Okay, let's listen. [00:31:05][0.7]
LIZ MOORE: [00:31:21] If the power [00:31:22][1.0]
DAVE: [00:31:41] Like a... [00:31:41][0.6]
LIZ MOORE: [00:31:45] Like us, like us The desert strikes a frequency that hits [00:31:57][11.7]
DAVE: [00:31:58] That is our guest Liz Moore. That's her song Across America, When You Were What. [00:32:02][3.8]
LIZ MOORE: [00:32:03] I think I recorded that when I was 22. I had, I probably wrote that song when I was 21 or maybe younger, I don't remember. [00:32:12][9.0]
DAVE: [00:32:13] Do you think there's a relationship between your musical voice and your writing voice? [00:32:16][3.4]
LIZ MOORE: [00:32:17] I do in the sense that I think a lot about the rhythm of lines. I'm obsessed with how sentences end. I love to end with a single syllable word. I think it has a lot of impact. It lands like a drumbeat. I think about things like alliteration. I think. And in the sense that I actually don't love it and I try to avoid it actually if we're getting technical. Yeah, oh, and here's the other thing that I think I take from music. When I'm writing, sometimes I'll know the beats that I want a sentence to have before I know what words will slot into those beats. I can sort of hear the number of syllables I want to sentence to has before I now what the words will be. [00:33:07][49.5]
DAVE: [00:33:09] You know, I did some reading in both of your last two novels over the last couple of weeks when I knew I was going to be talking to you. And I found, going back, all this stuff that was more enriching and complex. I mean, which is just a sign of, I think, of all those endless hours and word documents that you put. I mean this really is a really fulfilling read. Do you think about wanting to make sure that you're writing, particularly when you're reading mysteries, literary mysteries? Mysteries as opposed to, you know, I don't know, what we call it, denigrating, to call it beach reading, I dunno. Do you think about that? [00:33:44][35.0]
LIZ MOORE: [00:33:45] The line between those two terms or how I'd like to be perceived. [00:33:49][3.6]
DAVE: [00:33:49] Yeah, and the kind of work you want to produce, yeah. [00:33:52][2.5]
LIZ MOORE: [00:33:52] I produce the only kind of work I know how to produce, which is work that's very attentive to its line-level writing, but also wants to tell a good story. And you know, Longbright River and the God of the Woods are my quote-unquote breakthrough novels in the sense that they've reached a larger audience than I ever had before. But the only thing that differentiates them in my mind from my first novels are that One. Has, they both, each one contains a missing person at the start and therefore they are perceived as or categorized as thrillers or literary mysteries. My first three novels also contained really, you know, story was something I was always interested in. A book of mine called The Unseen World deals with the mystery of identity. There's a character who has effectively lied about everything in his entire life, has invented an identity for himself. And his daughter only discovers this after he begins to lose his memory. So she has to figure out who he really is and why he lied. Heft, there's a mystery of family, is all I'll say. I think in the U.S. We're much more preoccupied by questions of genre than other countries are. So when I published my books in other countries, I even notice that there's less of a divide between fiction and non-fiction or fiction and memoir. I don't really care what genre my books are called. I write the way that I've always written. I read very, very broadly. I love reading mysteries. I love read literary fiction, whatever that means. I love, now I love the books that my daughter is reading. I think there's some really really excellent young adult books, some excellent graphic novels. I think reading in general is a morally good thing for human beings to engage in, and probably a good exercise for our brains that lets us decompress from the very rapid onslaught of information that we get from forms of technology that aren't literature. [00:36:05][132.8]
DAVE: [00:36:07] You're working on another novel, which nothing can be said about, right? [00:36:11][4.0]
LIZ MOORE: [00:36:11] Nothing can be said about the novel in progress. I don't even, it's taken me a very long time to even show anybody anything before I'm finished and even still it's usually just my agent or my editor. My husband gets very upset at times because I rarely will reveal even to him the world that I'm writing about. I just find that if I talk about it before it's done it really knocks the wind out of my cells and it, it's sort of like receiving. The gratification before I deserve it. Does that make sense? I need to delay gratification until I'm done with a manuscript. So I really keep it under wraps until I am done. [00:36:53][41.4]
DAVE: [00:36:53] Your cake will be baked in four years. Wait for it. [00:36:56][2.4]
LIZ MOORE: [00:36:56] That's right, that's right. [00:36:58][1.7]
DAVE: [00:36:58] All right, well, we'll look forward to it whenever it comes and to the series. Liz Moore, thank you so much for speaking with us. [00:37:04][5.4]
LIZ MOORE: [00:37:04] Thanks for having me. [00:37:05][0.5]
DAVE: [00:37:06] Liz Moore is a writer based in Philadelphia where she directs Temple University's Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing. Her last two novels, Long Bright River and The God of the Woods, both bestsellers, are available in paperback. [00:37:06][0.0]
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DAVE: [00:00:00] If you're a fan of thrillers, this is a big week on television, with sequels to two hit shows. Prime Video has dropped the first three episodes of The Night Manager, a follow-up to the 2016 series based on John Le Carre's bestseller, with Tom Hiddleston and Olivia Colman reprising their earlier roles. On the 14th, Apple TV offers the first two episodes of Hijack, season two, starring Idris Elba. It's a story about passengers held hostage on a subway car in Berlin. Our critic at large, John Powers, has this review. [00:00:33][33.1]
JOHN POWERS: [00:00:34] When I first began reviewing television, after years of doing film, I was struck by one huge difference between the way they tell stories. Movies work hard to end memorably. They want to stick the landing so we will leave the theater satisfied. TV series have no landing to stick. They want leave us unsatisfied, so we'll tune into the next season. Oddly enough, this week sees the arrival of sequels to two hit series. Apple TV's Hijack and Prime Video's The Night Manager, whose first seasons ended so definitively that I never dreamt there could be another. Goes to show how naive I am. The original Hijack, which came out in 2023, starred Idris Elba as Sam Nelson, a corporate negotiator who's flying to see his ex when the plane's skyjacked by assorted baddies. The story was dopey good fun with Elba, who's nobody's idea of an inconspicuous man, somehow able to move around a packed jetliner and thwart the hijackers. The show literally stuck the landing. It was hard to see how you could bring back Sam for a second go. I mean, if a man's hijacked once, that's happenstance. If it happens twice, well, you're not going on vacation with a guy like that. Still, season two manages to make Sam's second hijacking at least vaguely plausible by tying it to the first one. This time out, Sam's on a crowded Berlin subway train whose hijackers will slaughter everyone if their demands aren't met. From here, things follow the original formula. You've got your grab bag of fellow passengers, Sam's endangered ex-wife, some untrustworthy bureaucrats, an empathetic woman, traffic controller, and so forth. You've got your nonstop twists and episode-ending cliffhangers. And of course, you've got Elba, a charismatic actor who may be better here than in the original, because this plot unleashes his capacity for going to dark, dangerous places. While more ornately plotted than the original the show still isn't about anything more than unleashing adrenaline. I happily watched it for Elba and the shots of snow falling in Berlin. But for a show like this to be thrilling... It has to be as swift as a greyhound. At a drawn-out eight episodes, four hours more than movies like Die Hard and Speed, Hijack 2 is closer to a well-fed basset hound. Things move much faster in season two of The Night Manager. The action starts nearly a decade after the 2016 original, which starred Tom Hiddleston as Jonathan Pine, a night manager at a luxury Swiss hotel who gets enlisted by a British intelligence agent that's Olivia Colman, to take down the posh arms dealer Richard Roper, played by Hugh Laurie. Equal parts James Bond and John Le Carre, who wrote the source novel. The show raced among glossy locations and built to a pleasing conclusion. So pleasing that Hiddleston is back as Pine, who's now doing surveillance work for MI6 under the name of Alex Goodwin. He learns the existence of Teddy Dos Santos, that's Diego Calva. A Colombian pretty boy who's the arms-dealing protege of Richard Roper. So naturally, Pine defies orders and goes after him, heading to Colombia disguised as a rich dodgy banker able to fund Teddy's business. Here Pine attends a fundraiser that Teddy is hosting, and the two feel each other out. [00:04:15][220.7]
Speaker 3: [00:04:16] So, you came alone, no one to keep your company? I'm always open to offers. Oh, I like that. And I'm sorry, I just thought that you might be married or... I tried it for a while. French woman in Hong Kong. Didn't get a plan. She's back in Paris now, with our daughter. I'm not a family guy. Let's just say, I like my freedom. [00:04:49][33.1]
JOHN POWERS: [00:04:51] While David Farr's script doesn't equal the Carré and sophistication, this labyrinthine's six-episode sequel follows the master's template. It's positively bursting with stuff. Private eyes in private armies, splashy location shooting in Medellin and Cartagena, jaded lords in honest Colombian judges, homoerotic kisses, duplicities within duplicities, a return from the dead. Plus, Crackerjack performances by Hiddleston, Laurie, Coleman, Calva, and Haley Squires as Pine's sidekick in Columbia. Naturally, there's a glamorous woman, played by Camilla Morrone, who Pine will want to rescue. As it builds to a teasing climax, yes, there will be a season three, The Night Manager serves up a slew of classic La Carre themes. This is a show about fathers and sons, the corrupt British ruling class, Resurgent nationalism? And neo-imperialism. Driving the action is what one character dubs the commercialization of chaos, in which the powerful smash a society in order to buy up and profit from the pieces. If it had come out a year ago, Season 2 might have seemed like just another far-fetched thriller set in an exotic location. These days, it feels closer to a news flash. [00:06:15][83.7]
DAVE: [00:06:16] John Powers reviewed the new sequel of The Night Manager and season two of Hijack. On tomorrow's show, we hear from Jodie Foster on her life and career, from her early days as a child actor to taxi driver when she was 12, marking its 50th anniversary next month, to her Oscar nomination for the film Nyad and her Emmy for the series True Detective. She's now starring in the French language film A Private Life. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producers are Danny Miller and Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Deanna Martinez. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers and Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Anna Baumann, Faya Challener, Susan Yakundi, and Nico Gonzalez-Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly C. V. Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross, Antonia Mosley, I'm Dave DAVIES. [00:06:16][0.0]
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