Transcript
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Speaker: Ooh, a spicy question.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: Because the writing is sort of everything, right?
Speaker: You can fix plot holes, but if the writer... So some readers love that and some readers are like, but I wanted more of this.
Speaker: So it's kind of a gamble.
Speaker: Hello and welcome back to the Right and Wrong podcast.
Speaker: Today I am joined by a writer and essayist from Richmond, Virginia, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and McSweeney's, as well as many other outlets.
Speaker: Her debut novel came out last year and her second novel is releasing later this year.
Speaker: It's Audrey Burgess.
Speaker: Hello.
Speaker: Hi, thanks so much for having me.
Speaker: Thanks for coming on.
Speaker: Now I normally start these with whatever the kind of current publication is, but it feels like you're right in the middle of your first and second one.
Speaker: In fact, the paperback of your debut novel, The Minuscule Mansion of Myra Malone will be out by the time this airs.
Speaker: I'd love to start off with you telling us a little bit about that novel.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: So the minuscule mansion of Myra Malone is about a reclusive 34 year old woman who kind of has been housebound since she was a child in her house in Arizona.
Speaker: And she's kind of devoted her life's work curating this minuscule mansion.
Speaker: She really takes offense when people refer to it as a dollhouse.
Speaker: She inherited that from her step-grandmother.
Speaker: So her best friend has been trying to convince her to put it online for quite some time.
Speaker: And when she finally manages to do that, not long after that, they're contacted by someone who lives across the country and who lives in a full size version of the house right down to the furniture.
Speaker: And so the book kind of unwinds how that could possibly be true.
Speaker: Yes, it's a very interesting and sort of peculiar tale of, would we say magical realism?
Speaker: Yeah, I would say so.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Just a little bit of, it's kind of near, near world, just a little bit of magic with a world that we recognize.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And absolutely beautiful cover.
Speaker: I've seen both the US and the UK one.
Speaker: They both look great.
Speaker: I have looked, I've really lucked out with covers generally.
Speaker: Yes, I have.
Speaker: I can claim absolutely no credit for it, but I, every time I get one, I'm like, Oh, this is perfect.
Speaker: Yeah, they are.
Speaker: They are.
Speaker: They are great.
Speaker: And I think very representative of the, of the book as well.
Speaker: Well, the interesting thing, I don't know if you know this or not, but the UK cover, both the hardback and the paperback, those miniatures on the front and the back were actually commissioned by the publisher, by a miniaturist called Hannah Lemon.
Speaker: And they're the miniatures from the book.
Speaker: So she actually read the descriptions of the furniture and made those for the cover.
Speaker: Oh, that's so cool.
Speaker: It's very cool.
Speaker: Do you know where they are?
Speaker: The actual physical miniatures?
Speaker: So she kept them.
Speaker: She actually started doing a kind of a promotion for it and showed how she had made it and everything like that.
Speaker: Interestingly, one of the pieces on the back, when they were first sending me the pictures of the pieces in progress...
Speaker: There's a picture of a bed, Alex's bed.
Speaker: And that actually, that was one of the few, there were a few pieces of furniture in the book that were from real life.
Speaker: And that was one of them.
Speaker: That was a piece, that was a bed that I actually slept on that I inherited from my great grandmother when I was a small child.
Speaker: And I don't have it anymore.
Speaker: So when they sent me the picture, I actually burst into tears and I sent it to my grandfather.
Speaker: And I'm like, this is your mother's bed that I used to sleep on when I was a kid.
Speaker: So yeah, so she still has them.
Speaker: And she still, I see them in little tableaus that she puts together on Instagram and stuff from time to time.
Speaker: And it always gives me a little thrilled.
Speaker: Oh, that's from the cover.
Speaker: That's so cool.
Speaker: What a cool kind of physical memento of the story.
Speaker: Yes, absolutely.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So you've been writing and publishing short stories and essays for a long time and for a number of big publications.
Speaker: I'd love to know if this novel, The Miniscule Mansion, was this your first kind of go at a full length novel?
Speaker: It wasn't, actually.
Speaker: And the way that it came about was because the humor and the essays.
Speaker: I'm so sorry if you can hear my dog in the background.
Speaker: He's very upset with me.
Speaker: The first book that I wrote was a kind of a dark and twisty mystery that was completely different from this one.
Speaker: Um, and when I wrote it, one of the things that I started reading, you know, everywhere I could find about what do you do when you write a book?
Speaker: How do you start getting this book published?
Speaker: And one of the things that all of the articles advised was start building a platform, you know, start, start getting an audience.
Speaker: And that's when I started writing short stories and essays and short humor.
Speaker: And it kind of became its own thing.
Speaker: But it also became completely inconsistent with the tone of this first book that I'd written.
Speaker: And so after a while trying to find that one a home, it dawned on me that maybe what I needed to do was write something a little lighter hearted, a little more fun.
Speaker: And so originally, The Miniscule Mansion was intended to be a romantic comedy.
Speaker: There was just, you know, she was building these miniature kits.
Speaker: I was following a lot of people online who were buying books.
Speaker: these book nook kits that would slide between books on your book.
Speaker: And some of them have lights and fireplaces and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker: I thought, okay, well, I'll have somebody who builds those for, you know, online sales and she doesn't leave the house.
Speaker: And somehow one of them makes their way to, you know, some guy and they have a meet cute and fall in love.
Speaker: And instead, as I started writing, I didn't get very far into the book at all until I got, I was probably only a couple thousand words in.
Speaker: When the scene in the book that I think is now in the second or third chapter about Myra as a child seeing her eye wink back at her in a mirror in the house and not knowing how to wink herself, that scene kind of jumped into my head fully formed.
Speaker: And as soon as it happened, I went, oh, this is a different book.
Speaker: This is not
Speaker: this is not a romantic comedy.
Speaker: This is something else.
Speaker: And I knew exactly where that wink came from.
Speaker: And from that point on, I started writing that book and tried to keep up with kind of what I realized had happened with that, that blink of an eye.
Speaker: Oh, that's so interesting.
Speaker: So it really did start out with something else and then moved into something else and then became something else entirely.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: It was the, the characters were really, um,
Speaker: They had their own voices in my head right away.
Speaker: And I could really I could hear the way Myra and Gwen talked to each other and I could hear the way, you know, Lou talked to Myra.
Speaker: And so it really that really kind of helped inform how these characters interacted, where their history was, that sort of thing.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Did you have an agent when you were writing this book or did you go out on submission?
Speaker: This is the book that got me an agent.
Speaker: So this book, I went out to a few people who had had the first book and had been complimentary about it, but hadn't wound up ultimately picking it up.
Speaker: And, uh, and I also had some, some friends who referred me to some other agents who were interested in magical realism.
Speaker: And it was in the process of sending this book out that I wound up getting my agent.
Speaker: That's interesting to know.
Speaker: Cause I was wondering.
Speaker: through your other writing, your short stories and things, if you'd already found an agent or something like that?
Speaker: But it's interesting to know that you did it with this.
Speaker: No, I actually had had a couple of times, because I'm not nearly as active as I was anymore, but I used to be very, very active on Twitter as part of my humor writing.
Speaker: And I had had a couple of agents reach out to me and say, you know, hey, this was really funny.
Speaker: Have you thought about writing a book?
Speaker: And I was like, well, actually, since you mentioned it.
Speaker: The ones who read that first book were kind of like, oh, yeah, no, not this.
Speaker: And when I had the mansion done, I had a couple of agents who reached out that way, too.
Speaker: And they were very nice.
Speaker: One of them didn't wind up going forward, but also had kind of commented, you know, I really wanted to see more detail.
Speaker: I'd love it if you described in greater detail what the mansion looked like and where the rooms are and how it's been.
Speaker: And I kind of resisted that.
Speaker: And I'm glad that I did.
Speaker: Because in my head, one of the things that I like best about this story, one of the things I like best about stories that I enjoy is when there's just enough detail to kind of give you a skeleton of
Speaker: But you put on all the muscles yourself.
Speaker: So I love the idea that there's as many versions of the mansion in the world as people who have read about it.
Speaker: And I've had people... I had someone stop me once in a meeting and say, just so you know, the mansion has a pink roof.
Speaker: But I just loved that.
Speaker: I was like...
Speaker: I'm so happy to hear that.
Speaker: I'm glad your version of the band has a big group.
Speaker: So it was a fun exercise to kind of find a good match for someone who really kind of shared that vision for what that world could be.
Speaker: Yeah, that's really interesting as well, because it's sort of along that school of thought.
Speaker: And there's a lot of authors who try not to describe the characters too much.
Speaker: They'll sort of give them one trait, like this character had spiky hair, and then they'll just do nothing else.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: So that you just let, you become sort of participatory.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Join in on the creation.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And that's actually why, you know, I think we've all had that experience where, you know, we, we have a book that we love and it gets made into a movie or a series and you see who they've cast and you're like, no, no, that's not who that is.
Speaker: I have always really liked that because I love talking with people about books that they they have read and I have read and we've both loved and how differently we experienced it.
Speaker: I just that's to me, that's one of the most fun things about reading is is the fact that the story on the page is really pretty distinct from the story that winds up in that in that reader's head.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, 100%.
Speaker: It's a different experience for everyone that reads it, which is what's kind of so great about reading.
Speaker: It's not just the author, it is collaborative with the reader.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: So let's talk about the second novel.
Speaker: And I noticed that while we were talking about Minuscule Mansion, that you mentioned it sort of started out a bit darker, a bit more sinister.
Speaker: I feel like A House Like an Accordion
Speaker: I read a bit of the blurb.
Speaker: It sounds immediately more sinister than the first one.
Speaker: Yes, it is.
Speaker: It does have a bit of, it has some more darkness to it.
Speaker: That book, so A House Like an Accordion is about a woman who is middle-aged and realizes one day that she's starting to literally disappear, starting to fade away.
Speaker: And as she's trying to figure out how that could be happening and what could have caused it, she realizes it must be tied to a peculiar talent that her father, who had disappeared decades before, had.
Speaker: And then she kind of has to track him down to figure out how to stop it.
Speaker: But that book, I didn't mean to write two successive stories.
Speaker: magical house books in a row.
Speaker: Um, and it's not a house, like an accordion, the house is not really as central to the story as, um, as the mansion is, but it's, um, it started of all things, that book started with a tweet and it actually started with a tweet that a friend of mine had posted, um, asking, you know, if you, if you had a, in your life that money was no object, you, you know, you,
Speaker: You had endless money and you could do whatever you wanted with it.
Speaker: What is the thing that you would do that would make your life feel more complete?
Speaker: And I love seeing all of the replies, but I was also really surprised that the answer that I came up with popped into my head immediately.
Speaker: And it was really weird.
Speaker: It was that I would...
Speaker: track down and buy all of the houses that my dad had built when I was growing up, all of the places that we lived.
Speaker: Because my parents were builders in addition to teachers.
Speaker: And they...
Speaker: there wasn't a single place that I lived growing up that was not a construction scene at some point.
Speaker: And usually when the house was finished, that's when it was time to leave.
Speaker: And so when I had this idea that, you know, that's what I would do, I thought that's kind of interesting.
Speaker: There's kind of a story there.
Speaker: Why would someone do that?
Speaker: Why, you know, why did they move so frequently?
Speaker: Why do they want all these houses?
Speaker: And the story kind of started to spin its way out from, from that central conceit and turn really into a story about, um,
Speaker: The fact that, you know, how much of who we are as people gets defined by the people we came from and how much we have to wind up defining and anchoring ourselves.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: That's so interesting.
Speaker: Cause I was going to say there's definitely a theme here with sort of real estate being at the focus of your stories.
Speaker: And I'm wondering if it's because growing up, you sort of, all of your houses were sort of semi-permanent.
Speaker: So that's why you kind of gravitate towards these stories of people being attached to certain homes.
Speaker: I think, I think it is, you know, I'm, I'm one of those people that I have certain recurring dreams.
Speaker: And one of them that I have from time to time is I'll have a
Speaker: I'll have one of those places that for some reason it turns out we left something behind and I've got to find it and I've got to, you know, get it back.
Speaker: And that kind of sense of, of being unfinished or having something that I have a connection to out in the world that I've got to get back to.
Speaker: I think, you know, to a certain extent, the fact that I had that as kind of a foundation that, all right, I didn't mean that as a pun, but the foundational concept that, that, you know, that I had kind of had this background, um,
Speaker: there's kind of an inherent magic in building, right?
Speaker: So, you know, my father never was without a book that had graph paper in it.
Speaker: And he was never not sketching rooms or, you know, additions or things like that.
Speaker: And there's a, I think there is a kind of, especially when you're a small child, the fact that you can go from this very two dimensional concept to something that's real and that you can step into and live in and have as part of your life.
Speaker: That is magic.
Speaker: I mean, that doesn't seem like anything other than magic when you're small in particular.
Speaker: So I think that just kind of burrowed its way into my brain and does wind up.
Speaker: I'm one of those people that always notices architecture.
Speaker: I always notice the feel of a building.
Speaker: And I think that that's because it was such a big part of my life growing up.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And totally makes sense why you do seem to be very much interested in the place as a theme in your books.
Speaker: So House Like an Accordion is out 21st of May.
Speaker: Remarkably fast follow up to your debut.
Speaker: As you said, you alluded to, you didn't really intend to write two books almost simultaneously.
Speaker: Am I right in thinking that it's actually being published by a different imprint to the first book?
Speaker: So it's being published by the imprint that was the first imprint for the Minuscule Mansion.
Speaker: So the Minuscule Mansion came out in the U.S.,
Speaker: almost a year ago, January 24th, with Berkeley, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
Speaker: And they are also the ones that they actually, at the time that they contracted for the mansion, they also contracted for a second book, which was actually accordion.
Speaker: And I was about halfway through writing it when that contract got signed.
Speaker: And so, um, so there it's coming out there, the same publisher, although a different imprint.
Speaker: So it's actually coming out on ACE, which is the kind of fantasy imprint for, um, for Penguin Random House, uh, because it is a little more, it is, it is still, I would say closer to magical realism than full out fantasy, but it definitely has a lot more fantasy, a lot more fantastical elements to it.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: And so that's why it kind of, it was a slightly different fit than Berkeley, which tends to focus a lot more on romance, plus a little something else.
Speaker: And this has some of that, but not as much as the mansion did.
Speaker: Oh, I see.
Speaker: So it was more of a genre reason why it's on different interests.
Speaker: You're tiptoeing the lines of different genres.
Speaker: Correct.
Speaker: I was fortunate enough to work with the same editorial team and everybody was exactly the same.
Speaker: It's just a different picture on that final page.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: That's really cool.
Speaker: That's really interesting.
Speaker: And I'd wager that you're probably already working on something new.
Speaker: Does it involve a connection with some kind of homestead?
Speaker: It doesn't actually.
Speaker: I'm actually currently working on my seventh book, but I have two others that are kind of on submission right now.
Speaker: And one of them does the
Speaker: does have a house as part of it.
Speaker: But again, it's not central to the story.
Speaker: Uh, and it was totally by accident.
Speaker: I got to the end of my first draft of that book and went, Oh, and there's a, there's another house.
Speaker: Look at that.
Speaker: But the, um, but those are really, uh, I would say those three are the only kind of, um, building centric books.
Speaker: The rest are, um, kind of funny, um, sort of, uh, right.
Speaker: Same kind of thing.
Speaker: I really love, um,
Speaker: reading stories that seem plausibly here, but there's just a little bit of an element of something other.
Speaker: And, you know, I love that in Neil Gaiman books.
Speaker: I love it in, um, Aaron Morgenstern books.
Speaker: I love, uh, you know, that kind of sense that the world that we're walking through every single day might have something more to it that only certain people can see.
Speaker: And so that element kind of works its way into everything that I write.
Speaker: I'd say probably a little bit, even in my, in my humor writing, there's always a little bit of the surreal.
Speaker: And that's because I just, I find that so interesting myself.
Speaker: The books that I'm working on right now is actually a funny, I believe the genre is cozy horror, which has been a lot of fun because I've been able to just kind of throw myself into a completely different feel, which is, which is a lot of fun to explore.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So did I catch that correctly?
Speaker: You're currently working on your seventh book.
Speaker: That is correct.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So is this, is Minuscule Mansion was book number one, two is coming out.
Speaker: So you have five.
Speaker: Yeah, it was technically, so Minuscule Mansion was the second book that I wrote, first book that got published.
Speaker: After A House Like an Accordion, which was book number three, I wrote two more in fairly quick succession books.
Speaker: Um, and then, uh, wrote, I actually started putting together a, a kind of an anthology with new material of the humor pieces that I'd published.
Speaker: Um, and then I, uh, started writing two additional novels, uh, one of which was actually a sequel to the mansion.
Speaker: Um, and so, um,
Speaker: we, uh, I've, I've kind of got all of those in the wings.
Speaker: I'm somebody who I, I, I tend to do better when I have several projects underway at once.
Speaker: And I use them as kind of palate cleansers for each other.
Speaker: So if I hit a wall on something that I'm writing, I can switch to, you know, a short story or something funny or another, you know, plot elements in a, in a outline for a book I'm working on or that sort of thing.
Speaker: So I tend, and I also, I write,
Speaker: I write really, really fast.
Speaker: I've always written really, really fast, largely because of my career.
Speaker: I'm an attorney and I always did a lot of litigation where you have to
Speaker: write accurately and persuasively and quickly.
Speaker: And that lends itself a lot more to creative writing than I ever would have imagined.
Speaker: You know, when you've got to convince a judge to go your way on something, it's not all that different from trying to convince a reader that this world that you've put in front of them is worth their time.
Speaker: I always, I have described it as my hamster brain.
Speaker: I kind of have, my brain is going all the time, like a hamster on a wheel.
Speaker: And, you know, I let it run all through work, all through the day.
Speaker: And then I come home and I put it on the mom wheel.
Speaker: And then I get the kids into bed and I take the hamster off and I put it on the fiction wheel.
Speaker: And just right and right and right until I can't anymore.
Speaker: And then I do it all again.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: That's incredible.
Speaker: The amount that you are fitting in to 24 hours of daylight.
Speaker: It's, it is, uh, it's sometimes a little exhausting because I've never been able to turn it off.
Speaker: Um, and it's one of the, frankly, it's one of the ways I, I stay sane.
Speaker: Um, I just kind of have
Speaker: have a story going or a few stories going at any given time.
Speaker: I also learned that because I have things tend to weird, I'm the type of person that I'll notice a detail and I, I can't let it go.
Speaker: I can't, you know, it can be something as simple as a necklace I see on the street and I ain't
Speaker: I can't just be like, oh, there's a necklace on the street.
Speaker: And so my brain is like, oh, who dropped that necklace?
Speaker: Was that a precious necklace?
Speaker: Did they get it from their great grandmother?
Speaker: What happened?
Speaker: Like, was there a tragic accident that made this necklace fall off?
Speaker: Did somebody break off?
Speaker: And I can't, it's like that all the time.
Speaker: I've described it to people and they, a lot of them look at me either like I've grown two heads or like, you poor thing, that must be exhausting.
Speaker: And it is actually kind
Speaker: that I can't kind of let those details go.
Speaker: But it's hugely helpful for stories, because I have kind of learned to never let one of those details go.
Speaker: If one of those things catches in my brain, sort of like a fish hook, I immediately get out my phone and, you know, jot a note to myself, or I have a long text thread of voice to text that I send to myself when I'm driving.
Speaker: Accordion actually started that way.
Speaker: Um, and, uh, where I just kind of spin out those details so that I, I have something written down that I can go back to later.
Speaker: Uh, and sometimes when I go back, it's nonsense and I don't, I don't pursue it any further.
Speaker: And sometimes I go back and I go, Oh no, yeah, that could really be something.
Speaker: Um, and it's kind of fun to see which of those things wind up playing out into something bigger.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: That's really, that's really cool.
Speaker: And it feels like sort of any one tiny thing that happens to you in a day could spin out into some kind of wild story.
Speaker: Yes, absolutely.
Speaker: And what's your, if that's your kind of inception of the stories, how they begin, are you the kind of person that then takes that and then plans and plots out the whole thing?
Speaker: You know, I've, I started out as a pure, almost a pure pantser.
Speaker: where I would have some kind of overarching idea of where the story was going.
Speaker: And then I would kind of outline as I went, you know, I'd put little, I used to use brackets a lot where I would kind of put an open bracket and then write, write something brilliant here later, close bracket, and then go on to the idea that I had, that I had to get out on the page.
Speaker: And so I used to jump around a lot.
Speaker: And as I've, as I've continued to develop as a writer, I've,
Speaker: I've become a lot more linear in the way these stories come out.
Speaker: And I don't know if that's just...
Speaker: by virtue of the types of stories and the way I have to make sure they're constructed so that I don't drop details.
Speaker: Or if it's just my brain has got, I think I had such a backlog of stories when I started writing that it all kind of, you know, it was like a overfilled balloon that just started, you know, pushing out in a cascade for a while.
Speaker: And now that I've been doing it for a while, I'm a lot better at kind of being like, no, we're going to, we're going to direct this train of thought into something that makes a little more sense than just, you know,
Speaker: you know, spray painting onto the page.
Speaker: And so I, I definitely, what I will sometimes do, the first book I ever wrote was kind of a math exercise.
Speaker: It was sort of convinced myself that I could do it.
Speaker: I outlined the plot points and then kind of told myself, right, how many, how many words would I need
Speaker: to tell this part of the story.
Speaker: And I was doing that because the first book I ever wrote, I wrote a National Novel Writing Month.
Speaker: And I wanted to convince myself that I had 50,000 words worth of story there.
Speaker: It turns out I had 87,000 words worth of story there.
Speaker: After that, that kind of exercise sort of informed what I do with every story as it starts to unwind.
Speaker: I sort of have a... I've started... The other thing that I built into my practice...
Speaker: after the first couple of times is I write the synopsis first and I give myself permission to deviate from it but having that skeleton written down when you actually do have to have a synopsis and a blurb and that sort of thing is so much easier than trying to kind of...
Speaker: you know, come up with that, that encapsulation of the story later.
Speaker: So with a kind of a kind of a roadmap, and sometimes a few words for each chapter to just kind of remind myself what I have to achieve before the next one.
Speaker: That tends to be my process writing books now.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So there's, there is a sort of roadmap, but you're more than happy to go off road.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And sometimes I do.
Speaker: A lot of times, you know, particularly if it's a plot point that has to originate with the character having a conversation, those tend to go all sorts of places that I didn't expect.
Speaker: And, you know, someone will say something that is a huge revelation that even that surprises me.
Speaker: I'm like, oh, that happened.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: I have to build that back in.
Speaker: And so so that's kind of fun, too, is that, you know, I give myself the highlights, but I also give myself permission to play.
Speaker: So I don't feel like I'm, you know, having to be too regimented, slogging through.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, it sounds like you've really, you've really kind of honed that process and you've really found a, a good rhythm that works, that works for you.
Speaker: And that brings us to what is always the final question of every episode.
Speaker: And that is Audrey, if you were stranded on a desert island with a single book, which book would you hope it would be?
Speaker: So I had to think really hard about this question.
Speaker: Um, and I know that you probably ask it anticipating that someone is going to tell you a novel and I have a million favorite novels.
Speaker: But when I was thinking of the thing I would want on a desert island, I have a really strange answer.
Speaker: And that is I have a 1950s edition of The Joy of Cooking.
Speaker: And it's huge.
Speaker: It's massive.
Speaker: And it was before the days that, you know, people wrote big stories before a recipe.
Speaker: But it was also from the days where the writers assumed that you would have occasion to know how to break down an entire deer carcass and turn it into dinner.
Speaker: And I just, but at the same time, you know, the same book has, you know, chapters about fancy dinner parties and how to, how to lay out your fine silver.
Speaker: And I just love the juxtaposition.
Speaker: Again, to me, it's, there's, there's so many different stories there about, you know, the type of assumptions that result in this huge compendium of every possible circumstance under which you might need to prepare food and all of the weird ingredients you might have close to hand to do that.
Speaker: And so,
Speaker: Because, again, I'm the type of person who spins out stories from details like that, I would have an endless font of fun thought experiments if I had something like that close to hand.
Speaker: Oh yeah, that's an amazing choice.
Speaker: That sounds like a truly fascinating book from another time.
Speaker: Yes, exactly.
Speaker: And you're so on the money back before people put their biographies.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: You can fill in the details yourself.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Amazing.
Speaker: Well, that's an awesome choice.
Speaker: Very unique as well.
Speaker: Thank you so much, Audrey, for coming on the podcast and telling us all about your books.
Speaker: The one that is about to come out on paperback, it's been out since last year, and the new one.
Speaker: I'm amazed at how much you are writing, how much you are putting out and looking forward to hearing more of your name as more of your books come out.
Speaker: Thanks so much for coming on.
Speaker: Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker: It was delightful to talk to you.
Speaker: And for anyone listening wanting to keep up with what Audrey is doing, you can follow her on Twitter at Audrey underscore Burgess, on Instagram at Audrey Burgess, on Facebook at A Burgess Writes, or on her website, www.audreyburgess.com.
Speaker: To make sure you don't miss an episode of this podcast, follow along on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.
Speaker: You can support the show on Patreon.
Speaker: And for more Bookish Chat, check out my other podcasts, The Chosen Ones and Other Tropes.
Speaker: Thanks again to Audrey and thanks to everyone listening.
Speaker: We'll catch you on the next episode.
