Podcast Introduction & Support Options
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To listen without ads, head over to patreon.com slash rightandwrong.
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Ooh, a spicy question.
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Because the writing is sort of everything, right?
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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.
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So it's kind of a gamble.
Introducing Aubrey Lascure and Her New Novel
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Hello and welcome back to the Right and Wrong podcast.
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On today's episode, I am joined by a writer of both fiction and nonfiction, an acclaimed essayist and short fiction author,
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Deputy Editor of a literary magazine, off assignment, and author of the brand new novel River East, River West.
Exploring 'River East, River West'
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It's Aubrey Lascure.
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Thank you so much for having me on your podcast.
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Oh, you're so welcome.
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Thanks for coming on.
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Let's start with the novel, new and exciting, River East, River West, which is already out in the US, will be out in the UK on the 25th of January.
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Tell us a little bit about it.
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My release for the West is my debut novel.
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It's a coming of age story as well as a family drama and social novel set entirely in China.
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And it follows a biracial teenage girl called Alba growing up in Shanghai around 2007, 2008, as well as her Chinese stepfather,
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Lu Fong, a wealthy businessman and landlord who her mother marries out of the blue.
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So the three of them have all moved in together in this middle-class neighborhood in Pudonga district in Shanghai and are figuring out a tricky cohabitation.
Character and Thematic Development in the Novel
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And Lu Fong is actually my novel's
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secondary narrator.
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So we go back in time to the 1980s in a city in Northern China called Qingdao and we peel back the layers of history and kind of personal drama that he's experienced as a young man when he first meets a young foreign woman named Sloan who came into China as a foreign teacher.
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Yeah, well, it's a wonderful setup, very interesting locations and kind of an exploration of sort of identity and race and finding one's place in the world.
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We often see, and especially I think with debut novels, is you'll see authors reflected in their own work.
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But in this case, it's...
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Difficult not to see like a lot of similarities between you and Alva, specifically one of your protagonists.
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How much of your own life and experience is like part of the characters and the stories in this?
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So going into novel writing, I always knew that I was going to stay pretty close to my lived experiences insofar as the social observations and realism truths go through.
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So my own background is that I'm half French and half Chinese, and I grew up with primarily my French expat mother in China until I was 16 and lived in Northern China and Shanghai, attended Chinese public schools, was very close.
Aubrey's Cultural Background and Personal Influences
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It was my Chinese family on my dad's side.
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my last two years of school in China that I attended an international school in Shanghai and was fully immersed in the world of expats and international schools.
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And all of that really was a shock to me at the time in terms of expat attitudes and behaviors.
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I mean, I, of course, you know, of foreigners, uh,
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who lived in Shanghai and would attend some events, but it wasn't until going to school amongst my teens that I witnessed a lot of
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let's say, in the times it's a massive and condescension they have towards the Chinese society around them.
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So I always knew I wanted to write something that captured the heart of those socioeconomic and racial dynamics.
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And I think that part of the novel is
Narrative Techniques and Challenges
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dynamics I've observed or experienced myself.
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But I'm happy to report that in terms of plot points, definitely not everything happened to me.
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A lot of dark things do happen in this book.
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And I think that's something I learned along the way of writing and revising this novel.
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that I had to play with characters, I had to play with plot, sometimes really interesting things that might happen because you have a combination of thought ingredients that didn't happen to you in real life.
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It would almost be a crime not to use them in a novel to make it more interesting.
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So yeah, that's a bit of where the truth lies in this book.
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So there's a sort of underlying authenticity to it where it's, it is something that you lived and experienced, but obviously you've kind of changed.
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It's a sort of alternate version from outside looking in.
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Obviously you're talking about some made up character experiencing these things.
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I think what helped me really improve the book was at some point acknowledging and really forcing myself to think of the characters as characters and Alva, you know, not...
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as myself, even though it's sometimes the name I use on Ubers and in Starbucks.
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But that aside, no, it's all jokes aside, it truly helped the writing on a very granular level, even to not think of Alva as just a stand-in for myself, because
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They, her early chapters had a kind of, um, had a lot of problems with pacing and interiority, just basically me being too self-indulgent because it's, you know, it felt like too highly autobiographical or stream of consciousness.
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And once I decided to make that severance, this character isn't me.
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I need to treat her like, you know, an actual novel character and to keep things moving along.
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Um, I think the pacing of the writing itself improved a lot.
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Okay, that's interesting.
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So was it sometimes before you kind of made that decision, were you sort of writing and subconsciously you were just kind of projecting yourself in like your own very like lived experience into this?
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And I think in terms of, um, what I mentioned about the stream of consciousness, you know, when I was, uh, well, five or six years younger and writing this novel as a, as a very, very newcomer to fiction, um, you know, I was still very, um, under, um, under the hold of all the works I admired in university of my favorite writers.
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And there was a lot of kind of high literary stream of consciousness style and,
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I would have Alba chapters that would have, you know, five or six pages that were just like thoughts and memories occurring in her head while no, you know, real action or plot was happening on the page.
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And I think that was a kind of indulgence that was both, you know, a combination of being a young writer and a fan of all these literary traditions and also a lack of
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distancing between my own voice and the narrative voice of the character in the book.
Character Timelines and Narrative Structure
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So it sounds like you really went on a sort of personal journey almost with this as like a writer to kind of find the place where you kind of nailed that narrative.
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Did you have a similar experience or was it very different writing the other protagonist?
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Writing the other protagonist, Lu Fang, who's a middle-aged Chinese man and definitely not me, was actually an incredibly refreshing experience.
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And he's a point-of-view character and narrator.
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that I added halfway through working on the novel.
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So initially I had a full manuscript that pretty much only followed Alva as a main character.
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And I was attending a year-long writing workshop class in Boston, where I live, where nine other classmates read your novel manuscripts twice over and workshop it.
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And one of the most crucial pieces of feedback I got the first time around is why, why are we not hearing from Lu Fang?
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He seems to be the beating heart of the novel in so many ways.
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And so for that whole entire summer, I set out writing, um, a narrative only from his point of view and because it was so fictional and because I was so distant from him and because it took place in the 1980s, um,
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The 90s and 2000s, his timeline kind of leaps from decade to decade as it parallels China's development.
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That forced me to really come to it as a fiction writer.
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You know, I would be like, okay, when we check in with Lu Fang in the 2000s, these are kind of the big...
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climactic things that need to happen.
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And I almost treated, you know, every, every, uh, section narrated by him as a short story, uh, because it was so contained within decades spanning leapfrogging, um, moments.
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And that really helped me grow as a writer because I saw how I could tell one character story in this very kind of
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intentional, more orchestrated, more controlled way.
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And in contrast, the Alva sections were kind of, as I said, like sprawling and highly interior and less plot driven.
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So having his timeline and his POV kind of forced me to go back to the Alva ones and work on them so that they were more balanced and also felt more, you know, controlled and intentional and well paced.
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So you felt much more in your wheelhouse, treating that more like a sort of creative nonfiction?
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Well, I would say Alva's perspective was first creative nonfiction.
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And that was primarily my background as a personal essayist.
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And then, yes, it was Lu Feng's sections that forced me to
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step in the shoes of a fiction writer.
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And, you know, now I feel so much better equipped to start a second novel and think about scenes and dialogues and all these story mechanics.
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With so much of it, I was really just learning on the fly during the process of drafting and revising the first book.
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Yeah, that's so interesting.
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So it sounds like you actually wrote, you essentially wrote both point of views as sort of separate things in their own entirety.
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And then did you figure out where you wanted to move between them in the kind of final novel?
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It was a really, really thoughtful looking process because thankfully I had all the sections and her timeline already more or less mapped out when I was...
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writing Lu Fangs, but the whole point of having the multiple timelines was to bring out this dramatic irony and juxtaposition of how much the characters...
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don't know about each other or, you know, what is unknowable about each of their private lives to the other.
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So I was thinking very deliberately about, you know, maybe you just found out about something major happening in Alba's life at the end of her section.
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And then there's a handoff and we go back to, you know, a particular era of Lu Feng's life where maybe something,
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That's either highly relevant or pertinent on a plot level happens, or maybe sometimes in more subtle ways, maybe he's in a parallel situation where he's had to make a moral choice.
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that will be very reminiscent to the reader as, you know, as they just write this album, and you kind of see the juxtaposition of how the two characters acted in those different sections.
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And, of course, it's very intentional that they're, you know, structured right next to each other.
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So I was constantly thinking about this question of dramatic irony, juxtaposition, how one section can fill in a gap that I've just opened in a previous section.
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and play the exact
Aubrey's Writing Journey and Career Transition
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Okay, so it actually worked out kind of well where Alva's storyline served as a sort of really good kind of checkpoint marker system for when you were writing Lufang's.
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And I was, you know, if you open my notebooks at the time, I definitely was even kind of graphing it out.
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Like if, if we, because if we had just reached some kind of emotional high in an alpha section or some kind of a
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And the next Lu Fang section is, I don't know, about him buying milk or too quiet.
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That contrast, you know, might not.
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It's nice to have some contrast, but the emotional kind of frequency might be totally off.
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the mark so i also wanted to be careful that as as kind of the emotions ramp up or major things happen in one section and then we have a pov switch um that kind of emotional frequency or intensity of the next section should kind of still be in conversation with what happened in the other um and then conversely some other times it might be exactly the right time to kind of let the
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let the emotions fall and have this kind of relief or breathing room for the reader.
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So yes, it was, um, it was kind of a challenging process craft wise, but also really fun puzzle to figure out.
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Like you said, I'm sure for whatever you write next, the amount of learnings that you've taken just from that process and kind of figuring out as you went must be, must be immense.
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So you, you're kind of very well prepared for whatever you do do next.
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Although I will say, I will say that was novel number two, which I've been thinking about for a year and a half, but have only written a few chapters.
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The reason why my progress was so slow was because I was committed to avoiding
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all mistakes I made in novel number one.
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I was like, oh, I was having so much trouble with pacing and plotting and I am going to have everything planned and plotted for novel number two before I even write a single word on the page.
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And that will help me avoid, you know, all these problems.
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And then I just wasn't writing for a whole year.
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I was thinking, thinking, thinking, but at some point that became stale.
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And, and I just had to tell myself, you know what, even if
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You have some idea of the plot.
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You can't control all the variables.
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Writing is a process and an adventure.
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You just have to make yourself dive in.
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You can't literally carry all the lessons of book one into book two.
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At some point, they become actual obstacles or mental blocks for writing instead of helpful tools.
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one lesson that you sort of have to take from the first book is that you in the end created a complete whole kind of book that was, you know, really, really great.
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So like as difficult as that process might've been, you got there in the end.
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Whereas if you try and do something sort of very different, take a very different approach, that's new uncharted territory for you.
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You're going to have to learn new lessons to do it that way.
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a different being, a different puzzle.
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And I think as a writer, it's control can be a very difficult and complicated relationship that we have with our own work.
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And there's this urge to kind of maximize efficiency by maximizing control and sometimes letting go of it and just saying, okay, this is
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some, you know, subconscious terrain or evolving material that you just need to really push control over and let yourself, you know, explore a little bit and, and alchemize the way, you know, things, things might evolve over the years.
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It's, it's kind of a,
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beautiful process in hindsight.
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But when you're living it, it can feel like utter torture sometimes.
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So this is your debut novel, but you have co-authored and translated.
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Is it two other books on politics and economics in China?
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And those were, I mean, I'm a little bit cheap, I should say.
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They were ghost books I worked on when I was way in my early 20s.
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Back when I had just graduated from university, I actually studied political science when I was a university student.
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And I was quite...
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committed to having a career in foreign policy.
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My dream at the time was to become an embassy worker and live around the world.
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And I guess you can see a parallel in terms of some degree of
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internationalism or, you know, wanted to work in a cultural space.
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But I worked for one year at a think tank in Washington, D.C.
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right after graduating.
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And it was a really exciting place to be, but I was surrounded by other young people and researchers who were so passionate about statistics and running regressions and Excel spreadsheets.
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And I was like, uh-oh, I am not...
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at all passionate about this and and it's something i'm interested in but actually i saw that you really um as a young person you get to have a deep love and high tolerance for something to be you know committing to a professional path in it and that's when i was like oh i think you know foreign affairs is is my interest but not really um my passion and so i saved up my salary from that year i saved up my
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traveling and freelancing in the year afterwards.
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And so that's when I worked on translating the book on Chinese economics from Chinese to French.
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and picking up various other freelance or editorial gigs.
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And slowly, that way, over the years, I carved out some kind of a multi-pronged living as a writer and editor, which brought me to where I am today, which is a space where I worked
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I'd just say I work only with words, whether as an editor or a writer, and I feel really lucky to be able to do that.
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Okay, that's really interesting.
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I didn't realize that was the ghost part of it.
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I didn't realize that was something that you were doing, but it's really cool to know that you can make that work and you can do that kind of freelance stuff and make enough money from doing those sorts of projects.
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I was moving around a lot between Europe and Asia, always trying to
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fine living situations that made sense for my level of income that year.
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But even hearing myself talk now, I'm thinking, wow, that's something at 21 or 22 I had more aptitude for and now at 30 it actually sounds nice to have some more stability and future comforts.
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But I'm glad that my younger self took that leap and took those risks.
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You ticked it off the list.
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Don't have to do that again.
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Hopefully, hopefully.
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So now that you have published both fiction and nonfiction, do you have a preference?
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Do you know which one you would rather kind of pursue in the future?
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Yeah, it's really interesting.
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I think for me, it depends on length or scope for long form books.
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And I'm not really sure why.
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I guess unless at some point in my life I stumble into a topic that's rich enough for me to do a work of hybrid reportage or write a memoir about it.
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Maybe I'll do a book on some fiction, but right now it feels like for a book on some work, fiction is the answer.
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But in short form,
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I'm not a short story writer.
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I think they are the most challenging, um, forms of creative writing that exists out there.
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And when I'm writing something shorter, I really delight in the essay form.
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It's one of my, um, old times favorite and, and the magazine I work for, um,
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that you mentioned off assignment, it's dedicated to personal stories and place writing.
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Um, and it's all short form personal essays.
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So that's also what I primarily edit and it's kind of what I live and breathe, um, as an editor.
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So yeah, I don't, um, I don't know what to make of it, but I think kind of lens and form kind of dictates the preference for fiction versus nonfiction, at least in my writing life.
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So, and a lot of it will be if there's like a topic that piques your interest.
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Or, um, I mean, I'm trying to, to branch out and become an essayist and a nonfiction writer who writes about more than myself and my own lived experiences.
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I'm starting to get quite sick of those and kind of have already covered that ground over and over and over again.
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But when I was, you know, setting out to be a writer and, and learning how to become one,
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I think the self was kind of this endless,
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well of material that had been marinating for such a long time and felt like it was so ready to be told and malleable.
Recurring Themes in Aubrey's Work
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Um, so, so I wrote mostly personal, personal essays, uh, about, you know, my personal experiences or, or my fascination was place.
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I think a common theme and all of my writing, whether it's essays or, um, the novel or fiction, it's, it's kind of always about the character's relationship to place.
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That's, that's, I think it's always going to be a theme in my work.
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Something for you to talk about with your therapist, probably.
Desert Island Book Choice
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what this was no i'm just kidding um amazing that's um that's so interesting it's so interesting to hear all about your your kind of writing and how you approached it and how you kind of tackled this debut novel um that brings us to what is always the final question of every episode um and that is ob if you were stranded on a desert island with a single book which book do you hope that it would be i would i
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Bring along Roberto Bolaño's 2666, which is one of my all-time favorite books that I've only listened to so far.
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I actually first listened to it when I was walking the Camino de Santiago, the long-distance hiking pilgrimage in Spain.
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And I chose the book because it was almost 40 hours long.
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which felt like a very good companion for walking a very long walk.
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But I have to say it's kind of a cult classic.
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It's very mysterious.
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It's very, very...
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glooding and atmospheric and feels like it has this kind of strange magnetism to it.
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And it's a kind of book, I think, that feels like it contains all the mysteries of the universe and all the interconnectedness and randomness of things.
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I don't know if you've read it, but yeah, if you come to it different times at different stages of your life, it will reveal different secrets.
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really long so it's it's a brick in physical form which i think would be really great for you know whacking the head of wild animals or potential attackers and pirate ghosts on this desert island i'm stranded on so i'm a pragmatic woman as well yeah always good to have a heavy weapon with you exactly
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That's a great answer.
00:25:22
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Your description kind of makes me think of The Alchemist, which kind of sends you a sort of energy to it, although that's a very short book, so yours is probably a better bet.
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Aren't those books wonderful?
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The ones that you feel like contain an endless, bottomless well of mysteries, even though they're, you know, in some ways they don't evolve.
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They're always going to be the same arrangement of letters printed on paper, but it's you in some ways who's also the endless well.
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So I love books like that.
Episode Conclusion & Socials
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No, that's so true.
00:25:56
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Well, thank you so much, Abe, for coming on the podcast and telling us all about River East, River West, and kind of everything that's gone into that and what you're sort of doing in the future and how you kind of are tackling the whole publishing industry.
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It's been awesome chatting with you.
00:26:12
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Yes, thank you so much for having me.
00:26:14
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It's been such a lovely conversation.
00:26:17
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And for anyone wanting to keep up with what Obe is doing, you can follow her on Twitter at Obre Lescure or on Instagram at Obe Noisette.
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You can also find her on the website www.obrelescure.com.
00:26:31
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And to make sure you don't miss an episode of this podcast, follow along on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.
00:26:35
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You can support the show on Patreon.
00:26:37
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And for more Bookish Chat, check out my other podcast, The Chosen Ones and Other Tropes.
00:26:41
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Thanks again to Obe and thanks to everyone listening.
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We'll catch you in the next episode.