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Episode 413: Young Woman and the Sea, from Book to Movie
645 Plays1 year ago
Glenn Stout is the author of Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World. It's now out in movie theaters and re-issued as a movie tie-in paperback by Mariner Books.
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Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Social: @creativenonfiction podcast on IG and Threads
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
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Transcript
Introduction to the Creative Nonfiction Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
You know, the perfect metaphor for the journey of book to film, I think, is Swimming the English Channel. ACNF resuses the creative nonfiction podcast cast since 2013. This is the show where I speak to primarily writers about telling true stories. I'm your host, Brendan O'Mara.
From Book to Film: 'Young Woman in the Sea'
00:00:27
Speaker
Look who's back. It's Glenn Stout. On the red carpet because his book, Young Woman in the Sea, how Trudy Edderley conquered the English Channel and inspired the world, re-released with a movie tie-in cover by Mariner Books. Young Woman in the Sea is in movie theaters now.
00:00:48
Speaker
and it stars Daisy Ridley. You know Daisy Ridley. Star Wars, other things. It's an outstanding book and one that didn't sell well at first because it came out during the Great Recession in July of 2009.
00:01:05
Speaker
But it's one of Glenn's most remarkable books and the happenstance of how this book became a movie is crazy. So we talk about the long road that led to this book being optioned and finally, against all odds, produced. What a trip, man. We also talk about book research and the ethics of writing biographies and how the universe sometimes throws you a bone. It's rare, but sometimes it happens.
00:01:31
Speaker
show notes to this episode more at brendanamara.com, where you can also sign up for my rage against the Algorithm newsletter. A short riff, four books, seven links, it literally goes up to 11. Writing prompt, happy hour, first of the month, no spam, can't beat it, downgrade to free.
00:01:50
Speaker
That is a tight intro, CNFers. That's what I call respecting your time, parting shot after the show on logging out. But right now, here's Glenn Stout, the longtime series editor of Best American Sports Writing, author of Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid, The Selling of the Babe, and of course,
00:02:09
Speaker
Whoa, frog in my throat, young woman in the sea. You can learn more about Glenn at glennstout.net and maybe hire him to edit your book. He's at glennstoutbooks on Instagram and threads. And away we go into the deep waters of the podcast.
00:02:36
Speaker
You know she's going to get across the channel eventually.
Crafting Suspense in Narrative Adaptation
00:02:39
Speaker
And I remember the scene where she finally does it and the way you wrote it when she gets her feet back on the beach. And I was hit with chills, even though it's coming. And it's one of those amazing things that you were able to recreate with the story. Well, it's funny because in the film, that same experience happens. You know it's coming. You know she's going to succeed.
00:03:05
Speaker
And it's funny, you mentioned that. And yeah, they actually use that in the film, not to give it away, but you see her feet touching the sand under the water. I just thought when I was writing it that, you know, you try to put yourself in the position of someone like her.
00:03:22
Speaker
And that has to be like after being in the water for 14 hours and your foot finally touches something, that has to be an extraordinary feeling. You know, in the book's narrative, I try to bring that across and apparently they decided to do the same thing in the film because it works there too.
00:03:39
Speaker
Yeah, and that's the thing. I remember talking with David Grant a couple times and how he's able to tease out suspense in these historical narratives. And it sounds very simple on the surface in that you're…
00:03:55
Speaker
We know how the outcome is, but they and their position don't. And so you're putting yourself into their subjectivity, and it plays out narratively from there. It goes to the thing that you've knocked me for, and a lot of sports writers do, whether you're doing a chapter or a set piece. Sometimes you tend to do the inverted pyramid in a chapter, and it's like,
00:04:20
Speaker
Okay, that works for a newspaper, but for a book we need to tease out the information linearly so it feels like a story.
00:04:29
Speaker
Right, you have to, you can't give the end before the beginning. Yeah. As simple as that. Yeah. You can tease the end maybe, but you can't give it all away. Otherwise, you know, why go through the experience? And, you know, and there's various strategies you could use. I mean, it was really helpful for me in writing Young Woman in the Sea during the swim to be able to put time stamps from like press reports that were tracking her progress.
00:04:58
Speaker
And that gave it, you know, that put time into it and that gave it a certain pace and a certain immediacy that would have been difficult had those little time stamps that said, oh, she's three hours into her swim. She's seven miles into her swim. If those wouldn't have existed, it would have been much harder to do that.
00:05:17
Speaker
Yeah. And so, yeah, this has been a journey to get this book onto the silver screen. So let's maybe rewind the clock a bit and just take us to the first steps where there were rumblings that this might be adapted.
Hollywood's Journey with 'Young Woman in the Sea'
00:05:37
Speaker
Well, there were no rumblings.
00:05:40
Speaker
It was in the spring of 2015. The book had been out six, seven years by then. Had been well received critically, but came out in 2009 right after the reception. No books were selling back then, and this one certainly didn't. And I got an email out of the blue from someone asking if it was available for option. And I Googled that someone right away and saw that it was Jeff Nathanson who has a real track record as a screenwriter.
00:06:09
Speaker
Oh, he sure does have a track record as a screenwriter. Let's look at a few of his credits. Speed 2, Cruise Control, Rush Hour 2, Catch Me If You Can, The Terminal, Rush Hour 3, Pirates of the Caribbean, Dead Man Tell No Tales, and The Lion King, and now Young Woman in the Sea.
00:06:34
Speaker
and sent it off to my agent and I responded yes I forwarded this to my agent and you know that was kind of that but you know I saw that he was like real from the start and I'd been queried other times by people who want to be screenwriters want to be producers don't have much of a track record
00:06:54
Speaker
And you don't want, you really don't want to get yourself tied up with something that might not be real. Because, you know, if you give them 18 months, and then, you know, Steven Spielberg comes calling your, you're out of luck, you know, the properties in somebody else's hands. That's really what it started. And I've since learned, Jeff doesn't remember even how he came across the book. But I heard an interview with Jerry Bruckheimer, who said that that Jeff told him he found it in a used bookstore.
00:07:23
Speaker
And he was looking for a story to adapt that he could write for his daughters, because he had two teenage daughters. And oddly enough, you know, at about the same time, my daughter was a teenager, and Joachim Rennig, the director, had two daughters that were teenagers. We all had teenage daughters. I think we were all interested in doing something that would be for them.
00:07:47
Speaker
And, uh, anyway, that's how it all started. And Jen, Jeff already had a working relationship with Jerry Bruckheimer and Bruckheimer signed on relatively quickly. And that got paramount to sign on relatively quickly and everything looked like it was going to happen relatively quickly. And then it didn't, you know, the perfect metaphor for.
00:08:10
Speaker
the journey of book to film, I think, is swimming the English Channel, because you can get really close to shore and swimmers have and the tide changes. And all of a sudden, you're not 200 yards offshore anymore, you're two miles offshore. And that kept happening with this paramount dropped it, which is called turnaround. So it went into turnaround.
00:08:33
Speaker
It's not that rare that a studio will drop it and another studio will pick it up. But this did get picked up by another studio and then they dropped it. So it went through turnaround twice, which is pretty extraordinary. But then, you know, eventually, you know, Disney a couple of years ago, a little over two and a half years ago, I got the word and I'd given up at that point because of COVID. I thought, well, you know, nothing is going to happen because of COVID with this.
00:09:01
Speaker
And actually that ended up, I think, helping in some ways because, you know, not much was taking place in Hollywood and the actress they wanted, Daisy Ridley, and the director they wanted, Joakim Rennick, were both available at the same time, which I was told never happens. You never get the director in the star you want at the same time. And
00:09:24
Speaker
We were fortunate enough to do that. And the budget came through that it could be done in Bulgaria, which has one of the largest film studios in Europe. Who knew? I certainly didn't. But it all just came together. The tide shifted. And once it did, we got on shore really quick.
00:09:44
Speaker
Yeah, and given that it went through turnaround two times, you know, what's your headspace as you're excited about like, wow, here's this thing that wants to be adapted, and it goes turnaround like shit, and then it happens again. And then you're like, how do you temper your expectations just to weather the storm of the whole process? Well, I tried to yeah, I tried to temper it from the very beginning. You know, even if you get options, you have about a one in 1000 chance of a film actually being made.
00:10:13
Speaker
You can go on Twitter every day and read about writers. You're going like, oh, my book just got optioned. Oh, my story got just optioned. And the right to be excited. It's a it's a cool thing. But don't expect it to happen. You know, it's in the same way that if you get a big advance, that doesn't mean you're going to have a best seller necessarily. So keep your expectations low. Keep focused on the work you're doing.
00:10:40
Speaker
you know, there was only really one time where I really got ahead of the skis a little, because I was told, hey, in a couple of months, be ready to go to Liverpool. And then it never happened. You know, literally one person had to had to sign off. And then that person decided to back out and the whole thing fell apart.
00:10:59
Speaker
Even if it happens fast, fast in movies is probably three or four years. So there was no sense waiting for something to happen fast. I still had to pay the rent and all that stuff. So I just had to focus on the work that I had in front of me. And this was nice to think about when I had insomnia.
00:11:21
Speaker
Yeah. What was that? Is insomnia something you've always suffered from or something that it was an onset during this time? Not really, but sometimes you just can't sleep and stuff. This would be a nice thing to fantasize about.
00:11:37
Speaker
Go back to Dreamland, you know? Yeah. Yeah, the last year and a half or so, sleeping has been tough. I call it the book panics. You wake up and you're just like, oh my God, are you going to be able to, hey, make the deadline or is this person going to call you back? Are you ever going to be able to call this person? Is someone going to put the kibosh on it? And then suddenly it's 2.30 in the morning and you're as awake as if it's noon.
00:12:02
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's it's a sleep can be a challenge. But, you know, I've been doing it long enough now that there's always something else to be done. And I'm now accustomed to the fact that the hard drive in the back of my brain
Behind the Scenes in Bulgaria
00:12:17
Speaker
kind of never goes off. So I've learned, I guess, to ignore it. Yeah. To ignore it or give it a drink. Yeah. And
00:12:28
Speaker
Just go down to the end of the bar and stay down there for a while. Yeah, here's a Quaalude. Go. Well, back in my day it might have been Quaaludes, but it's a...
00:12:41
Speaker
A little different now, I think. Yeah. I think what's especially great about the timing of this movie coming out is it seems like women's sports right now, especially in basketball, thanks to Caitlin Clark's emergence in college basketball and transition to the WNBA. You know, women's sports are really on the forefront in a way that they haven't been in quite a while.
00:13:02
Speaker
And an Olympic year too certainly helps. So I think it's just great that this movie really is, it's coming out at a really good time.
00:13:13
Speaker
Yeah, there's some real serendipity to that because I think Heart of Hearts, they really would have rather had it come out last year. But, you know, all this Hollywood schedules got screwed up last year because of the two strikes. So that couldn't happen. And as it turned out, gee, fortunate thing that it's the 100th year anniversary of when Trudy went to the Olympics in 1924.
00:13:36
Speaker
that the games are also held in Paris. Oh, wow. So she should get a lot of kind of accidental attention throughout the Olympics, because you know, her story still speaks to athletes today, particularly women athletes, particularly swimmers.
00:13:51
Speaker
He just talked about all the serendipity to how the screenwriter finds the book in a used bookstore and his daughters are of an age where he probably wants to write something that speaks to them and is inspiring to them. And just those things that just have to align that are so out of your control for this good fortune to happen.
00:14:12
Speaker
it's maddening to ever in insane to bank on that ever happening. So all you can do is, as you've told me and million times before is like, control what you can control. And that's your effort. Yeah, that's, you know, that's the bottom line right there. Because if I tried to stop everything and said, Hey, I'm gonna, you know, have a book made into a movie and everything, you know, I probably would have lost the house, you know, I'd be like living
00:14:37
Speaker
with my brother or something like that, you know, you just can't think that way. You have to focus on the work that's ahead of you, no matter what. You know, I think we've all been at experiences where we're like, we're onto a big story or something like that. And it's so exciting. You want to get ahead of yourself. But, you know, once you get kicked in the teeth on that once or twice, I think you kind of get over that notion of depending on anything, because the one, you know,
00:15:05
Speaker
You can control what you can control. And the other, I think, constant in this business is that it always changes. So what you might think is a sure thing one day isn't the next. You know, you always have to be light on your feet and you're changing up and moving to something else and doing something else. And, you know, it's a constant. You're just moving those cups with the ball under it on the table. You're playing three card money with yourself.
00:15:32
Speaker
And as the book is adapted, what becomes your role in the process, if any? My role in the process is to basically be cooperative and stay out of the way. Unless you're a Stephen King or JK Rowling or someone, you're not going to be asked in all likelihood
00:15:54
Speaker
to participate very much in the screenwriting. But you will be on call. I mean, I had a small consultancy contract with them. And I guess over that seven or eight year period that the book was under option, nine years, I guess it is now to this date, you know, I fielded hundreds of questions, mostly from Jeff, sometimes through him for the director, sometimes through him for, you know, the actors.
00:16:20
Speaker
And I just tried to be cooperative. You have to recognize that from the beginning, it's a collaboration. But your part of the collaboration has pretty much ended. You've given them the raw material. They make movies are a different medium. They're made in a different way than a book. There's no way to translate a book directly to film. No one can do it. Every book
00:16:43
Speaker
that goes to film is translated in some way into this other medium. And you just have to be aware of that and sensitive to it and open to it because it's not wanting going, oh my gosh, you changed my word, you changed this. That's not going to change anything. That doesn't necessarily make a good film.
00:17:02
Speaker
So if you recognize that it's a collaboration and stay open to it and supportive of it, then I think you have a good shot. I mean, I think I was really, really lucky in that primarily Jeff kept me involved and informed the entire time.
00:17:18
Speaker
not every day or anything like that. Sometimes it'd be several months before I'd hear from him. But when there was something I needed to know, he would get in touch. Or when there was a question that he had, that he needed an answer to, he would get in touch. And you know, that even took place when I was in Bulgaria for a week for filming. There was an issue that came up one day I was there and I got this rush like
00:17:41
Speaker
you know, what happened here? And fortunately had the book with me and I was able to like answer the question. And, you know, it's nice to feel that you weren't ignored, and that they were sensitive to the essential portions of the book, which I which I think they were. I mean, you know, the swim is presented very, very well. Trudy's personality in the film is the same personality that I discovered in the book.
00:18:05
Speaker
And her family relationships are the same. I mean, her relationship with her sister is really central in the movie. And it was also really central in the book. And one of the first things, one of the first conversations I had with Jeff, we discussed that. And I mentioned like, boy, I was really happy in the first iteration of the screenplay that I saw that she and her sister were right at the center of it.
00:18:27
Speaker
For those who, the grand likelihood that they're never gonna see their work translated to the screen, as much as that is kind of the dream for people to see their work visualized in that sense, what was the experience like for you just being able to be on set and to see it come to fruition?
00:18:49
Speaker
It was, you know, I didn't I had no idea what it would be like. I mean, except for little bits that I'd read of other people's experiences. And like when I went over to Bulgaria to be on set, like I didn't know what to expect. And the first day I show up, you know, you're it was in a it was actually in a building had a swimming pool in it. And I go there and there's all these monitors shrouded behind curtains and everything. But there's a chair with my name on it. And then
00:19:19
Speaker
you know, people come around, introduce themselves. And I find out that I'm sitting five feet behind the director. And I spent a week setting five feet behind the director for 1214 hours a day, which was an education in filmmaking that you could probably, you could probably drop $200,000 on a master's program and not get one 10th of what I learned in that one week just from observing.
00:19:46
Speaker
And that's what I tried to do when I was there was just observe, you know, speak when you're spoken to. You know, everybody was really nice, but I made sure they're working, man. I'm not getting in their way. That's they're working. I'm not getting in their way. If they need me for anything, I'm here.
00:20:03
Speaker
That's the approach I took. Other than that, I was just like a camera. I was watching everything, just like soaking it all in. And like I said, the days were really long, probably 14 hours every day, you know, but I got to see how a movie is made. You get to see some, you know, in one instance, I think the scene that I saw shot the most times was a scene where they were doing some pan shot of Daisy Ridley's arm
00:20:31
Speaker
while she's laying in bed in her steam room and the ship is, I think, coming back to America. And I bet they shot that 15 times. You know, one time there was the fold of the sheet was in the wrong place. Another time, you know, she scratched her nose, whatever. And, you know, that was hours, right? Shooting that over and over again. It's not in the movie. Not in the movie at all. So
00:20:59
Speaker
that can tell that tells you I think about you know the tedium of that because everybody who is on the film they say it's exciting the first time they say it's not that exciting after the first time it's kind of like first time in a major league baseball clubhouse it's pretty exciting the next few times it's just a bunch of guys in their underwear
00:21:20
Speaker
And, you know, I think if you go on set a lot, it soon becomes pretty tedious
The Magic of Filmmaking Collaboration
00:21:26
Speaker
because things take a long time. But it was all brand new to me. So I was, you know, I was pretty fascinated by the whole thing.
00:21:31
Speaker
Hearing you talk about the tedium of it, it's a lot like book writing, too. It's not glamorous at all. It's very clunky and takes a long time. It comes together over a long period of time, sometimes in 12-hour days if you're in a real crunch. As you know, you saw a different kind of grind that you're very much used to. Exactly. And then also just the scale of it, the number of people involved.
00:22:01
Speaker
I mean, there were at least 500 people involved in Bulgaria with the film. And, you know, I saw the film last weekend that the premiere and the credits run for seven minutes. And there's got to be over a thousand people listed. And that just underscores the collaborative nature of the process and how many people have to get involved and how many fingers are in the pie. And it also underlines just how
00:22:29
Speaker
absurdly difficult it is to get it made at all with all those people involved and all the different, you know, not just actors, but their agents and producers and film executives. And it's just, you know, it's endless. It's like running some strange gauntlet. And I guess it is a one in 1000 chance because with that many people involved, so much can go wrong, so much can can just cause it all to stop. But, you know, we made it to shore.
00:22:58
Speaker
Yeah, what would you say in all the days that you were on the set that was the most striking or memorable? Daisy Ridley was pretty remarkable. She did virtually all of her own swimming, and most of it was in the Black Sea. Now, that took place after I was there. They had to do some shots from underneath the water, like where she's kind of silhouetted, and they had to do some night shots that they had to make use of
00:23:27
Speaker
water tank on a soundstage. This thing was probably 75 foot square, maybe 25 feet deep. And, you know, they've got an underwater camera, they've got a camera on a crane that's shooting above. It's dark, it's lit in this way. And they've got a wave machine that's making waves, they're like four feet high. And she was in there for the better part of a full day. And, you know, filming shots over and over and over.
00:23:56
Speaker
That was like physically really grueling. And I don't think a lot of other actors would have put up with it. And she did so without complaint. You appreciate someone's professionalism when you see that. And you see the example that that sets. This was not a Hollywood movie set where I saw any drama whatsoever. It was very, very focused.
00:24:23
Speaker
You know, I saw one person get mad the whole time I was there and they were mad at themselves. You know, so I mean, that's the one that really stands out because you
00:24:33
Speaker
Plus other silly things, I mean, like the boat deck is on the back lot. So there is no boat in the, there is no real ocean liner in the movie. It was like in the back lot, like 50 feet from a major highway. You know, but they'll block it blocked off. So you'll never, you can never tell, you know, and the attention to detail too, of the sets and everything was just extraordinary. I mean, there's an underground pool
00:25:01
Speaker
that Trudy trained in when she first started swimming. And it was in the basement of an apartment building. And they recreated it on a soundstage, a full working pool. And what I noticed is the pipes in the ceiling of this fake pool had fake corrosion on them. Now, you're never going to see that. But it was there just in case. Okay, yeah.
00:25:25
Speaker
And that's the level of attention to detail that I saw everywhere. I mean, the production designer was extraordinary, absolutely extraordinary.
00:25:35
Speaker
Yeah, when I watch DVD extras, which I always make a habit of doing, because I love seeing how the sausage gets made with a lot of these things. And you see the attention to detail that will, by and large, like you said, go completely unnoticed by the audience. And yet, you know, hours and painstaking research to maybe get like the right patch right on a uniform. The buttons, right? You know, it's unnoticed because it's so good. Yeah. You know, if you notice that they screwed up.
00:26:04
Speaker
Yeah, it's like, yeah, to put all that effort in. Yeah. That's good. Yeah. So well, it's kind of like, you know, when you're doing it, when you're doing a book, man, you know, I've done a lot of sports books and by God, if somebody hit three oh five and you say they hit three oh four, there's one SOB out there who's going to start his review on Amazon saying on page seventy five, Glenn Stout said he hit three oh four when everyone knows he hit three oh five. I can't trust anything else in this book.
00:26:33
Speaker
Exactly. Okay. That's what they do. Same thing in a film. There's one funny story about the film. This is like right. Disney had said they were going to do it and everything is ready to go. I'm like super excited. This is, you know, over two years ago now. And like literally it's like the day they're going to totally sign off on it. And I get contacted. It's like,
00:26:56
Speaker
There's an executive that wants to make sure this really happened. Could you send us like a half a dozen newspaper clippings? I was like, well, you could have Googled it, but I guess if you're an executive, you don't Google, you have somebody send them. So I had to go through and five minutes later, I sent half a dozen.
00:27:21
Speaker
you know, pictures of clippings and that proved to them that yes, Trudy Utterly was a real person and she had actually did swim the channel.
00:27:29
Speaker
Yeah, and she was the, I believe she was the fastest ever to do it too, is that right? Yeah, she was the sixth person and first woman and she beat the men's record at the time by two hours and her record for women held until I think 1950, which is by far I think the longest that anyone's held a channel swimming record.
00:27:53
Speaker
When you're thinking about seeing, you know, this book that you that you wrote a while ago and you know, you see the movie poster and then you go in there and you see it come to life. Forgive me for asking these questions of like, what's that experience like? But I have to just keep plumbing into what that's like to see it realized.
00:28:15
Speaker
I don't really have a box to put it in, to tell you the truth. I mean, I had seen the movie before. I saw a rough cut about a year and a half ago. So I had seen it before, but this was like a link through my computer on our TV screen here. The experience was so alien and remote to me. I don't have anything else to relate it to, to tell you the truth. I'm sitting there and right in front of me is Jeanette Hain, who plays Trudy's mother.
00:28:44
Speaker
You know, across the aisle a couple of rows back is Daisy Ridley and Tilda Cobham-Hervey who play Trudy and Meg.
00:28:52
Speaker
you're at the reception afterwards, and oh, there's Jerry Bruckheimer. And at the showing of the film, Joachim Renig, the director, gets up. And one of the first things he says was, and he's on stage just basically welcoming everybody and giving out a few acknowledgements. And I was like one of the first people he mentioned. And he talked about just, what I really liked about that whole experience was hearing how everybody
Trudy's Legacy in Women's Sports
00:29:21
Speaker
involved in any capacity at all that I talked to, whether it was an actor or Jeff Nathanson or, you know, Yocum or anyone else, how they all talked about how people have to know Trudy's story, how important it is for Trudy's story to be known. Because despite my book and a couple of others, you know, her story is still almost unknown. And she's a real essential figure in not just the history of women's sports, but the history of women.
00:29:49
Speaker
because before Trudy did this, you could still make the argument that women shouldn't compete, that they shouldn't be athletic, that they can't be athletic. But once she did this, I mean, to use the metaphor, it blew that argument out of the water. And now it still didn't happen overnight or anything, but that was proof positive that women can do anything.
00:30:19
Speaker
and also prove positive that, hey, guess what? Some things they can do better. Because she did break the record by two hours. Now she used a stroke that no one else was using. I don't think a man back then would have tried to use a new stroke. Men are wired differently. She didn't have any trouble with it.
00:30:39
Speaker
That's kind of what stands out of the experience is to see how everybody was in it for the right reason. Because this isn't a huge budget film. My understanding is that a lot of people probably took less than what they would get doing something else because they were committed to the story.
00:30:58
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And it's like kind of getting back to that point of how you know there's there's an increased spotlight on women's athletics right now. And and it's Caitlin Clark. I bring her up again.
00:31:14
Speaker
What I like about her bringing attention, not just for herself and her sport, and her getting beat up right now, which is good and expected, I like that it's, her celebrity is shining spotlight on just how good everybody else is, that everyone was ignoring. Like Brianna Stewart, INSQ, so many, Aliyah Boston, so many other great athletes, and because of her, we're starting to see how great the others are.
00:31:42
Speaker
Yeah, you're tuning in to see Caitlin Clark and you're seeing everybody else. And I think, you know, Trudy, it was kind of the same thing, you know, when when she was first swimming and women swimming at the very beginning had a lot of fans because it was like, oh, my gosh, they're not dressed in swimming skirts down to their ankles. You know, people would attend for the for the cheesecake factor in some sense, you know,
00:32:10
Speaker
And then realized they were seeing, you know, women doing these some, you know, Trudy did some long distance ocean swims and things, you know, they might go there for the thinking they were going to get to see women in swimsuits. But what they saw was women doing things they couldn't do themselves.
00:32:30
Speaker
Yeah, and I remember in some of our conversations before about just the writing of Young Woman in the Sea, and there was family pushback that you had to navigate, and that's something I think that a lot of people who might write biography run into.
00:32:47
Speaker
So it's how do you navigate that and even even persevere in the face of that when you're like, oh, do I have any right to be telling this story? Well, yeah, I mean, I felt I did have the right because at that point, no other book had been done. You know, I didn't know it. But at that time, one member of the family was working on her own book, which which ended up being published. And it's a fine book. It's different than mine, but it's it's fine.
00:33:15
Speaker
But since then, beginning a couple of years ago, a member of the family reached out and said to me, we know the family put you off 20 years ago. We think that was a mistake. And our relationship is good and cordial now. They're supportive of the film and everything else. Because they too don't want Aunt Trudy, as they all call her. They don't want Aunt Trudy to be forgotten.
00:33:40
Speaker
And I've shared things with them that I've discovered that I found this wonderful picture of Trudy at age 15, a couple months ago, where she has hair down to her waist.
00:33:55
Speaker
And she's, you know, she was a competitive swimmer then. She looks so confident. It's just an extraordinary picture. She looks nothing like the pictures we generally see of her, which is where her hair is much shorter and she's just, you know, been swimming in the channel. So she's usually her face is bloated from the salt and jellyfish and all that stuff. She just looks like an entirely different person.
00:34:21
Speaker
And I took some copies of that picture with me to the premiere and was able to give out a couple of copies to important people there, including the young girl who played young Trudy in the movie. And it was great to see that reaction where you see
00:34:38
Speaker
you recognize, you know, you can see her recognizing herself in that picture. In some of our conversations and emails over the last, you know, a couple couple years, you know, we often talk about, you know, research and in a in a very internet home office kind of way, people have they've lost that a research muscle has truly atrophied or hasn't even been developed in the first place. And so
00:35:04
Speaker
What are some great research tactics that people need to need to know to fully flesh out their stories that might not involve a Google or even newspapers dot com. Yeah, well, I mean newspapers dot com for.
00:35:18
Speaker
history is really kind of key. And I actually had, I was working on a story with someone last year. And they actually asked me if I could write up a guide to how to look up things on newspapers.com. Because whether you're searching online, anything,
00:35:37
Speaker
you have to be aware of all the spelling variants because people just don't spell everything the same way every time. Or machine readable text doesn't always read it the same way every time. One of the most spectacular research finds I've ever had was when I was writing the book about Fenway Park, Fenway 1912.
00:36:03
Speaker
It was at the end of a whole day where I was searching in Google Books for various iterations of Fenway Park. Of course, it wasn't called Fenway Park when it was being built.
00:36:15
Speaker
searching Boston ballpark, you know, ballpark boss, you know, all these different variations. And somewhere I'd seen where they called it, they called the ballpark a baseball plant, like it was a factory. And I'm searching on Google Books. And there's one line that comes up from an index of engineering magazines from 1912, or 1913, because I think the park had already been built in. And
00:36:44
Speaker
it referred to Boston baseball plant. One line, I found that, I knew we had that magazine at the library because I'd worked there, I found it and it was a four page spread that includes the only architectural drawings of Fenway Park that still exist.
00:37:00
Speaker
and photographs of the park under construction and technical specifications on how it was done. That's half my book right there in those four pages. And that came after, you know, months and months and months of just looking, what can I find? What can I find? And mostly you find nothing until you find something.
00:37:24
Speaker
And I'm convinced that, you know, at a certain point, the universe when you're doing this says, okay, you've done enough work, we're gonna we're gonna throw a few gimmies to you. And if you've put in the work, then suddenly it's like iron filings to a magnet and suddenly really interesting key information just kind of finds you
00:37:45
Speaker
You're not looking for it and start finding things. And I've talked to a lot of other writers who have that experience and I fully believe in it. So, you know, that's the kind of thing. You just don't know where things are going to be, so you have to look everywhere you can think of and ask other people. And, you know, there's usually
00:38:04
Speaker
you know, at institutions, whether it's a library or museum or something like that, there's usually somebody there who knows where the things are that aren't in the catalog. Okay, they've worked there a long time. They know where the bodies are. You know, when I was at the Boston Public Library, by the end of my time there, I was kind of that person.
00:38:24
Speaker
You could come in looking for something, can't find anything. I knew the collection well enough then. I knew where you could find things that you're not going to find in the card catalog. It's just that simple. Not everything is cataloged. You have to know what are in certain collections. So that's hugely important.
00:38:44
Speaker
Yeah, what's been a trip for me and kind of disconcerting in a way, too, is finding things that you almost didn't know were there and the stuff you already curated.
Research Beyond Digital Resources
00:38:57
Speaker
And I've read this prefontained Sports Illustrated profile from June 15th, 1970 issue of Sports Illustrated a dozen times.
00:39:08
Speaker
But until I had a different set of glasses on, I didn't realize that some key motivation was right there in that story the whole time. It's pretty trippy and also sometimes exciting but also disconcerting that you've missed it the entire time and it was staring you right in the face, right from the start. Yeah, right. Everybody has to have their own strategy on how to keep track of all that stuff.
00:39:37
Speaker
I mean, I know there are people that use various programs and, you know, elaborate programs and filing systems and all that stuff. And it works great for them. You know, I think I've told you this before. I'm a I put things into piles and then folders and I use a highlighter. I make hard copies on everything that works for me. That's the process I'm used to. But, you know, you do over time, you know, over the year or two, it takes to write a book.
00:40:04
Speaker
You read all that stuff over and over and over again. And you start just realizing what's special. And then you realize what your gaps are. And then you have to research those gaps. You have to go from macro to micro. You have a basic outline. And then you're going down and you're going to more and more detail. And even when you start writing,
00:40:32
Speaker
Like I have never ever been able to do all my research before writing. There's just too much of it. I'll get to this second paragraph and realize, oh, I just mentioned a building. I don't know what that looks like. What's that building look like? Or, you know, where exactly is that in town?
00:40:51
Speaker
I don't have to stop and I have to go look at it. And that happens over and over and over again, because you don't know if you're gonna need that little bit of information. In Tiger Girl, there was one where Margaret and Richard, the two gangsters, when they first got married, where they lived. And it was pretty late in the process. I said, you know, I never looked up that building. I looked up that building and there's a story that everybody who lived in the building had busted for drugs.
00:41:19
Speaker
So like, oh, they're living in a drug den. That's interesting to know, you know, stuff like that. You just, you know, you never know what you're gonna find. And with Trudy, it's the same way, you know, one of the big,
00:41:35
Speaker
things in the book is that her first coach, when she tried to swim the first time, she thinks her first coach poisoned her. Now this was kind of alluded to in a lot of the papers and stuff, but she never really spoke about it directly, except, and I found one reference to it, she talked to somebody from the Harvard Crimson, the newspaper from Harvard.
00:42:01
Speaker
And she mentions it directly, that she thought she was poisoned. Now, why did she talk to the Harvard Crimson and no one else? Well, she's probably talking to somebody her own age. She's talking to some 21-year-old guy. And she let down her guard a little bit and talked about it openly. And it was nice to really pin that down, to not say that, like, well, she thought it happened, but to have her say directly that she believed it happened.
00:42:30
Speaker
And I've since talked to her family and they say that her whole life, she was pretty convinced that she'd been poisoned the first time for the first swim because Wolf, the first coach, he had quite a constituency of swimmers that he was training and a lot of women swimmers. And once one woman made it, most of those people would have stopped trying because there was a real thing on being the first. If you're the first, you're gonna be able to cash in. If you're the fifth,
00:42:59
Speaker
It's not such a big deal. When you said, you know, being first, you're able to cash in, you know, it makes me think of even, you know, kind of use this term earlier, kind of the ethics of biography and being able to write about, let's say, a public figure.
00:43:16
Speaker
And it is some, there is an, to some extent that the writer does benefit from trying to tell someone else's story for their own gain. And I wonder if that's something you kind of just wrestle with yourself and, you know, here you were telling Trudy's story and it is for some extent to keep her name alive and so people don't forget her, but it is also something that, you know, benefits you at the
00:43:42
Speaker
cost of the family. Well, you know, I think, I think, yeah, I think in terms of Trudy, it was her story was so important that that I just felt it had I, you know, I was the first one to say this has to be told, you know, why don't we know this, this has to be told, you know, the interesting thing is she was still alive when I first thought of doing the book, I had no idea she
Ethical Writing in Biographies
00:44:05
Speaker
was still alive. Now, at that point, she was well into her 90s. And I think she spent the last few years
00:44:11
Speaker
know, in a facility. And then by the time I actually started working on the book, you know, she passed away, but she'd had, you know, opportunities to tell her story, and it just never done so she'd written, I guess about 70 or 80 pages of her own biography at one point, but
00:44:28
Speaker
you know she's a pretty private person and you know not a professional writer and you know we fear in this business all the time we always hear from people who aren't professional writers who think they have a book in them and it's like well you might have 10 pages but you probably don't have a book and and it just really needed to be told and you know and I did have some people early on tell me well you know you were allowed to tell that story needed myself but you know they didn't allow a woman to tell the story
00:44:54
Speaker
Well, as far as I've ever been able to determine, like no one ever really tried to tell the story before. Like ever. Yeah. It just sat there. And so I don't feel guilty at all about being the one that found it and that that brought it to to the attention of other people because it was there for the taking for almost 100 years. Yeah. And, you know, I did the work to find it.
00:45:21
Speaker
I did the work, not just to find it, but then I did the work behind it to prove that it needed to be done and to convince a whole publishing company of that and to convince an editor of that and convince an agent of that. That's a lot of work. So I don't feel guilty for taking someone else's story. Maybe someone else could have told it better. Maybe someone else would have told it differently.
00:45:41
Speaker
would certainly be told a little differently today because there are more sources of information available now. I don't think anything that would dramatically change the story. You know, history is cumulative. So, you know, that's why, you know, you can write about, you know, people who still write about Babe Ruth because you find out different information.
00:46:01
Speaker
and you can retell that story and it's slightly different and it's fresh. And maybe someday someone will do that, Trudy. I'd love to see a documentary treatment of her story as well as, you know, the traditional film treatment. I think that could be really interesting, but, you know, we'll see about that because it's not just, you know, stories could be presented a number of different ways. I've written this in a juvenile book called Yes, She Can, which is about five different
00:46:30
Speaker
female sports pioneers. And I tell a very short version of Trudy's story in about 5,000 words for a younger audience. You know, someone eight or nine years old who's a precocious reader could read her story in those books. So same story, different audience, different goal. There's a lot of different ways to do it.
00:46:50
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, there's a, I heard Jeff Perlman talk about, you know, he had, for his Bo Jackson biography, you know, he had lobbied Bo to be a part of the process and Bo said, you know, by all means, if you're going to write a book, go write a book, but I'm going to sit this one out. And, and then I think Bo tried to put like a gag order on a lot of
00:47:14
Speaker
book events for Jeff in Alabama and everything. But it gets to the point of feeling. I think Beau probably felt exploited here by someone else writing about his story, researching his story. And I think every biographer kind of crosses that bridge at some point, especially with the living. Well, I didn't have to deal with it because she wasn't living. So she couldn't protest herself. Her nephew that I first contacted
00:47:43
Speaker
just told me straight out because I, my offer to them was if you'll share whatever resources you have, I'll make copies of everything I come up with and give it to you, you know, and he was, I think he was kind of misinformed. He was like, you don't have anything. We have everything. Well, you know, all they had was crap books.
00:48:01
Speaker
And, you know, I got I got, you know, probably 5000 documents at this point, you know, from old newspapers to, you know, Olympic reports and, and things like that. So, but I don't, you know, someone had to tell her story. And quite frankly, you know, if it wouldn't have been done now, maybe it wouldn't would never been done. You know, maybe
00:48:21
Speaker
everyone would have leapfrogged her again and focus on some other older athlete and write about them instead. I loved the book when I read it several years ago at this point and it's so great to see it adapted so it gets put in front of an entirely new audience and it's got that really riveting cover too now.
00:48:43
Speaker
Yeah, that is actually, the day we're recording this, the new cover, which is from the movie, that's out today. So hopefully, the book that very few people read, when it first came out, the movie will now lead them to the story, and the story will lead some people to the movie.
00:49:06
Speaker
cumulatively, I think it's going to lead a lot of people all over the world because this is getting an international release. They'll be led to this really essential story in the history of women and the history of women's sports that will be a revelation to virtually everyone. Yeah, it's wonderful when you can look back 100 years and draw inspiration that feels very prescient today and her story does that.
00:49:31
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And you brought up Caitlin Clark and that was a great comp because she has drawn all this attention towards women's sports all of a sudden in a way that hasn't been present before or hasn't been present for very long. And everybody's having a moment right now. And it's nice that Trudy can be part of that moment because that's a moment that she very much was at the
Podcast Analytics and Content Creation Concerns
00:49:56
Speaker
beginning of.
00:49:56
Speaker
Excellent. Well, Glenn, it's always great to talk shop on the show and then call attention to the cinematic release of this wonderful book that you wrote. So as always, thanks for coming on the show and talking shop and talking Trudy. Well, thanks very much. And if people miss it in theaters, it will start streaming sometime this summer, probably in advance of the Olympics, and will be then available forever on here.
00:50:25
Speaker
On whatever streaming sir on Disney streaming service
00:50:31
Speaker
awesome thanks to Glenn and thanks to you kind listener for making it this far crazy downloads for the show have literally been cut in half in the last month again I don't know why it's funny I've been fretting about it like because it's it's a significant amount like going from now I think I announced last time it was like from 9,000 ish a month to 7,000 month and I was into the 5,000s in the last five weeks which is
00:51:02
Speaker
It's just crazy. I don't understand what's happening. I don't know. The thing is, I reason with myself that maybe it's just a bug in the analytics and there's been no tanking of audience. It's just not registering through the back end. Whoever's back end I should be looking into. Ew. I'm not as connected with growth as I am with serving the listeners who stick around.
00:51:31
Speaker
I try to say in terms of newsletter audience or even podcast listeners that I got enough. I act as if, you know what? It's enough. And do right by the people like you who hang out and glean some insights and indulge my insecurities and petty jealousies from time to time. That's why I put that shit all the way over on this side of the podcast.
00:51:54
Speaker
In any case, as some of you know, I have no social media on my phone and just use threads and Instagram through the computer. But I logged out completely.
00:52:03
Speaker
Gonna take an indefinite leave of absence from that shit. Mainly because it invites an ugly side of me that I don't like. I get jealous real easy. I feel slighted very easily. I feel less than very easily. And I'm just done inviting that into my headspace. I feel weird saying it's better for my mental health, but it really is better for my mental health.
Logging Out of Social Media for Mental Health
00:52:32
Speaker
Is social media, is it serving me? Hell no. Did it ever serve me? Geez, no. No, it didn't. The great mirage of it is that it feels like at times that it does, but it really isn't. Is it serving you the listener? Me being on social media of doing... I don't think so. Am I sacrificing gaining more audience? Maybe a little through luck, but I don't think so.
00:52:58
Speaker
nobody reacts to a single thing I ever post on threads and my Instagram reels only get the minimal amount of views. Like it's, you look at it and it's like 120 views, 120 views. And it's like, Oh, okay. So the levers of the algorithm are just not pushing this in front of anybody. And that's,
00:53:21
Speaker
Frustrating and so why should I even put effort into that when it there's a choke hold on its visibility? you know and sure there's something to be said for posting that stuff in the event that someone might stumble across it, but You know I'd rather again just not invite the feed the infinite scroll into my head
00:53:43
Speaker
I'd rather put my faith in people searching for a creative nonfiction podcast and finding us, or in you, the listener, telling your friends, or sharing it with your people, because we all have people. Podcasts is like Snowpiercer, man, there's no stopping this train. I mean, we'll slow down and we'll let people on and off, so we're not totally like Snowpiercer, but it's a perpetual motion machine that somehow stays in motion.
00:54:13
Speaker
it defies the laws of thermodynamics but if i continue to make you happy entertained informed broaden your taste broaden my taste maybe throw in some crafty episodes who knows maybe publish an extra newsletter a month yeah that goes against the
00:54:31
Speaker
against what I often say is first of the month or once a month, but you know what? It might be worth knocking on your door just one extra time just to add some value.
00:54:45
Speaker
Might lose some people, might gain some people. Who knows? Like, I just want to be helpful. But in the absence of social media, how will you promote your shit? This is the challenge. I'd argue that, unless you're like super famous anyway, that promoting your stuff on Twitter or threads or wherever, it creates an illusion that you're actually reaching people.
00:55:09
Speaker
This is the challenge, but this is the long game and how to do it. You, me, we gotta publish widely. Always link back to our websites and our newsletter landing pages and build a body of work. Build authority. Encourage people to share.
00:55:26
Speaker
your work with people they think will glean insights, maybe even in-person events and pass around a clipboard. I'm not kidding. There's a great lyric from Metallica's Damage Incorporated, the final track on Master of Puppets.
00:55:41
Speaker
living on your knees conformity or dying on your feet for honesty. Sounds way cooler when I feel singing it with a monster breath. But to me, social media and giving into the great hoodwink is living on our knees and raging against the algorithm is dying on our feet. Now in this context, I'd rather thrive on my feet, but you know what I mean. I'd rather die on my feet
00:56:09
Speaker
raging against the algorithm, inviting invisibility in the internet world, then bowing down to the great infinite scroll. So stay wild, CNFers, and if you can't do Interview, see ya.
00:56:41
Speaker
you