Listen to the chapter here!
[Neil Pasricha]
Okay, hello, hello, hello, everybody. This is Neil Pasricha. Welcome to Three Books.
You are listening to our 22-year-long quest to uncover and discuss 1,000 of the most formative books in the entire world. How is your April? Are the flowers popping where you are?
Are the robins out? Are the birds flying around? Is it getting warmer here in the Southern Hemisphere?
Of course, it's getting a little cooler. I hope you enjoy chapter 159 with Eve Harlow, a fun Biblio conversation talking about reading habits, reading routines, how we become better readers. I don't know the state of reading right now.
I don't know about you. It's like the American Time News Study says that less people are reading books now than ever before. I think it was like 59% of Americans read zero books last year.
There was news in the last month about how mass market paperbacks are gonna be stopped. Like the traditional book format, the small kind of 25-cent book that came out in the 1930s meant to make reading ubiquitous, reading accessible. Are we going the other way now?
Is reading become like this, as Johan Hari told us in our interview with him, author of Stolen Focus, going the way of opera or volleyball? Are less and less people reading? Is AI taking over reading?
I don't know. I don't know. I think that we should double down on reading books.
I think in the era of AI, the sort of endless slop that can be produced at the touch of a button, maybe our tastes have actually heightened. Maybe reading good books, dissolving into a single tasking device like an actual book is worth more these days. That's what I'm betting on.
I love the feeling, it's hard to start. Yeah, it's hard to start. But I love the feeling of finishing a great book, of sort of getting away from screens, getting away from the news and just falling into a book.
And there's really, I think, nobody else to talk to this about than my guest today in chapter 160, the one and only Nita Prose. I have been very lucky to work with a number of editors over 16 years now writing books since the Book of Awesome came out in 2010. I had Amy Einhorn on the show in chapter 140.
She bought and edited the Book of Awesome, the Book of Even More Awesome, the Book of Holiday Awesome. She actually bought my fourth book, The Happiness Equation, when she skipped town, left Penguin Random House and worked for a different publishing company. But I was given the great gift of working with another wonderful editor named Carrie Cullen, who was our guest way back in chapter 11 when I traveled to her house in Washington, D.C. So if you're keen on how the publishing industry works, I have a third guest in this sort of triptych of great editors I've worked with today. And it is the one and only Nita Prose. Nita rose through the ranks of publishing for many years, working at HarperCollins, Doubleday, Simon & Schuster, where she ended up becoming the Vice President of Publishing and Editing at Simon & Schuster. She also was kind enough to reach out to me and ask to work together.
So we ended up doing two books together, my book on resilience called You Are Awesome, which came out in 2019, and my book on community and gratitude, Our Book of Awesome, which came out in 2022. Nita was the kind of editor that I always dreamed of having. She'd write me these long, deep, detailed editorial reflections on my manuscripts that would bring my wife and I to tears.
Like we were like, she sees, you know, what I'm trying to do with the work. She has a gift for sculpting, writing, and producing really wonderful work. She's worked with people like Rupi Kaur.
She's worked with people like, you know, the book's Girl on the Train. She has a real strong history. Ian Reid's books, Faux, I'm Thinking of Ending Things.
She's got a real long history of being able to kind of shape books of really disparate genres. You know, Ian Reid's books are kind of like horror. Rupi Kaur's books are like, you know, poetry.
My books are like self-help. She can kind of put them forward and produce these books that are wonderful for the reading audience. How does she do that?
How does somebody become an editor? What does a great editor look for when they're hiring? What are the sacrifices people make when they go into the arts?
And as we get into Nita's books, you know, she's the author of. I have a couple of them right here. If you're watching me on YouTube, you can see them.
She wrote this book, The Maid, herself. That's where she kind of came out and says, I'm not only an editor, I'm also a wonderful novelist. She got this great advance, and it was a huge hit.
Sold millions of copies, and she followed it up with The Mystery Guest in 2025. There was, of course, also, oh, that was 2023. The Mistletoe Mystery in 2024.
The Maid Seeker in 2025. Four books in four years. They have now cumulatively sold over two million copies.
What makes a brain like hers tick? What are the reading routines, the writing routines? How does she shape story?
How does she think about what to include, what not to include? If you are a student of writing or a student of reading, there's a lot to learn here. Let's flip the page together, everybody, and let's get into chapter 160 now.
So we're just kind of like getting our wires connected here, and I am sorry because, of course, I'm trying to do these things virtually, and I send links in advance, and inevitably something falls apart. And so we did some computer resets. We have some wires, but yeah, I feel like I'm, I don't know, I like your sort of, the problem is when I bump into someone else who also sort of tech-averse, you know, then together, we're just hopeless, and I feel like I'm just getting left behind.
Do you feel that way? Are you like, what's your view on AI?
[Nita Prose]
I mean, it's dangerous, right? Our work is getting stolen as writers, and I find that, you know, terrifying. The problem is that laws don't catch up as quickly as technology at this point in time, and that is the scariest part.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, I was talking to a friend of mine, Elan Mastai, who wrote the book, All Our Wrong Tomorrows. Yep. Also Toronto-based novelist from filmmaking.
You came from editing, he came from filmmaking, and he was like, I just don't touch it at all. It's all about the work. It's all about the practice.
It's all about mastery. It's all about, like, he was just painting of me a portrait of how he's so loathe to connect what he does as a novelist to AI, and I was really inspired by that, but then, of course, anytime I turn on Twitter or anytime I flip open a newspaper, you know, the AI race is just dominating the planet, and so you can't help but feel an internal, like, wait, should I be trying to figure this out? Like, and also, I also feel suspicion because 49% of all content on the internet last year was created by humans, and that number's been going down fast, and so in the next year, in the next year, in the next year, it's gonna be like 4.9%, 0.49%. Like, our visibility to ourselves is declining pretty fast.
[Nita Prose]
Yeah, it's a scary notion, for sure, but I think for creators, it's especially scary, and for writers, well, we're not dead yet, but we need to protect ourselves legally.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, Johan Hari had this line when I interviewed him, author of Stolen Focus, and he said, it seems to me that literature is going the way of volleyball or the opera. Some people like it, but not many, and it's a select few.
[Nita Prose]
I don't know. I think it's been like that for some time, in all fairness. We're a strange little cult, us readers, and I'm okay with that.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, we're a strange little cult, us readers, and I guess that's how you identify yourself, first of all. So I hit record. We can cut anything out that we don't like.
We're just gonna kind of have the conversation. I got your three books here. I got your books here.
I got books you've edited here. I'm excited to chat, and we go back. I was trying to do the math.
I even went into my inbox history, and I think we go back seven or eight years.
[Nita Prose]
It must be.
[Neil Pasricha]
To when I had done five books with Penguin Random House, and you were head of editing at Simon & Schuster, and you and the publisher approached me about, hey, do you wanna jump ship? And I had also lost my editor at Penguin Random House, who was Amy Einhorn, kind of at the same time, and she was our guest back in chapter 140, and I did jump ship, and we did two wonderful books together, and you were doing Girl on the Train, and you were doing all these huge blockbusters, and then it was almost like this surprise that I honestly read about it. I think I read about it in the newspaper, that Nita Prose, the editor, is getting a huge advance for her debut novel, The Maid, and I was like, what?
That's my editor. What's happening? That was like, what was that, like 2021, maybe?
[Nita Prose]
Yeah, I guess, probably if you said, yeah, because The Maid was published in 2022, so maybe the news was already out then. I don't know, it's all a blur.
[Neil Pasricha]
It's really all- And then 2022, The Maid, 2023, The Mystery Guest, 2024, The Mistletoe Mystery, 2025, The Maid Secret. Now you've sold over 2 million copies. You were trying to balance both jobs for a while, editor at Simon & Schuster and novelist, and then you've left me in the lurch.
No, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. Your career as a novelist has beautifully skyrocketed.
You've affected millions of people. I mean, I was on Goodreads this morning and I was like, you have over a million reviews of your books. That just tells you the depth of global dialogue you've spawned.
People like Stephen King and Jenny Lawson, past guests on the show, they've been singing the praises, my wife loves your books, my mom loves your books. You are, you're like Jeopardy category territory now.
[Nita Prose]
I'm not, but if that ever happens, I will pass out. I'll just tell you right now.
[Neil Pasricha]
What a ride.
[Nita Prose]
It's been a wild ride and it's still a wild ride. And that's the thing about a career in the arts is that it is always, always a wild, wild ride. So you've got to buckle up.
The lows are lows, the highs are highs, as so many of my friends in publishing say. And I think that's so very true, but I wouldn't have it any other way.
[Neil Pasricha]
Cause you grew up rural Ontario. You kind of, I won't say climb the corporate ladder cause I don't think publishing jobs sort of use that parlance, but like, you worked your way up through the publishing industry to the point where you were identifying, calling the shots, finding authors. I mean, I think I remember you over lunch one day telling me about five years ago how you found Rupi Kaur like at like a church basement in Brampton.
[Nita Prose]
Not quite. Am I right? It was something like that.
She already had her American publisher in place and we had heard about this poet from Brampton who was doing these poetry readings. And it was one of my colleagues actually who identified that and we're like, well, this sounds amazing. We need to know more.
So yeah, I mean, publishing is a wonderful thing. I have to say the reason I am where I am now as a writer is on the good grace of authors like you and so many others who taught me everything I needed to know about writing. I am either the slowest or the fastest writer in the world.
As you noted, I'm able to put out a book a year, but let me tell you, it took 20 years to get here. And that is slow.
[Neil Pasricha]
People see the four books, 2 million copies in the four years and the Good Morning America appearances and all the book picks and they sort of say, oh wow, what a lucky overnight success. But we had midnight email exchanges for many years where you were sending me these two, three, four pages of letters of thoughtful feedback and reviews and all my kind of early manuscripts. I would read them out loud to Leslie.
We would literally be in tears. So deep was your sort of emotional understanding and embrace of like, you know, my self-help books, you know, nevermind the sort of, you know, many books, you know, Ian Reid's books, right? Like Faux and I'm thinking about ending things.
I'm like, you really have a lot of work for a lot of years. What, like, what is an editor? You know, for those that don't know what an editor is or does, how do you become one?
What is that job? How do you see someone who's listening maybe becoming aware of that career and what makes someone successful in that job?
[Nita Prose]
Well, it's a strange job because it can mean many things, but the kind of editing that I did was really developmental and substantive. So I'm not there to change the commas and to fix your grammar mistakes. I'm there to help you build a story arc, to define your characters, to match what you want from your book with what you're actually executing on the page.
So what you said, I find that, you know, a really great compliment because my goal as an editor was to listen so closely that I could kind of be your best friend as a writer, listening as closely as you are so that I can define the parameters of your world and help you navigate the ins and outs of story to find your way through that labyrinth to the end. And it's a job I love so much. I've only ever been good at one thing.
I can tell stories or I can help other people tell stories. And it's funny because, you know, I've had different careers but all of my careers have been doing the same thing every single time. It's inescapable because it's the only thing I can do.
I'm not good at plumbing.
[Neil Pasricha]
And your house is moderately clean, I've heard.
[Nita Prose]
Yeah, at best.
[Neil Pasricha]
So, okay, so I'm 22. I'm interested in being an editor at a publishing company, finding, picking, you know, the next future novelist and spending my day, as I understand it, reading and inputting into story, you know, behind the scenes, sort of like a director of a movie. How do I do that?
How do I get there?
[Nita Prose]
You know, this is the one thing I still really love about publishing because the way in is exactly the same it always has been. So we were talking earlier about, you know, my Luddite ways, well, here it is. The way into publishing is like any old school career, it's an apprenticeship.
You may go to school, you may take some programs or you may take some credits. But finally, the way that door opens is by getting an internship in a publishing house and learning the ropes. And it's on the good graces of other editors and other publishing people that you will learn the inner mechanics of the secret society that is publishing.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, a secret society is a good term for it because here I am 15 years into maybe, well, it's probably 17 now, a deep relationship with the industry. And I'm asking you in 2025, how do you do it? Because I have no clue.
And so secret society makes sense. Now, when you were a successful prominent head editor at a major imprint, and by the way, for those that don't know, Penguin Random House, you know, biggest publisher in the world, HarperCollins number two or Hachette?
[Nita Prose]
HarperCollins is number two, I think.
[Neil Pasricha]
And then Simon & Schuster, I think is number three or Hachette maybe, but then three or four. So some of the top three, four, five publishing companies, everybody's heard of Simon & Schuster. You're helping to run Simon & Schuster Canada, which is itself, you know, a top five reading market in the world.
Obviously the U.S. is number one. England is up there, but Canada is no small potato. This is a big country.
We index twice the rate of reading as the U.S. does. And we read more books per year than any country in the world, except Iceland. Yeah, Iceland is 20 books a year.
We're 17 books a year. The U.S. is 12, and I'm not knocking the U.S., that's still top 10. But we read 17 books a year and there's 40 million of us.
That's why we have a giant, massive national book chain. That's why we have books in all of our drug stores and all of our Costcos and all of our Walmarts. We got books everywhere.
This is a literary nation. Hence, I can kind of scrap together a living and one thing is I have a books podcast here, you know. But you were looking for apprentices.
What would you look for? So take me to the other side. You're the successful editor.
I'm assuming you get, I think they call it a slush pile or something. You get like a lot of people applying to work for you. How do you decide who to bring on for that summer job?
[Nita Prose]
The first, you know, quality I look for is somebody who knows how to read and reads voraciously. And when I say, what are you reading? There's this look in their eyes, this excitement, and they cannot wait to talk about it.
Even if the books they're reading suck, but they cannot wait to talk about it. That sort of enthusiasm, that sort of inner glow when it comes to the world of writing has to be there and it has to be innate. It just has to be something you love to do the way athletes or athletic people love to do sports.
You know, you're a reader if you're a reader. And sometimes readers are made, but you know, by the time you're an adult, if you're not a reader, it's gonna be a little difficult. And certainly if you wanna go into publishing, you should be well-read and you need to be a readerly omnivore, you know, and read a bit of everything.
[Neil Pasricha]
How do you define well-read?
[Nita Prose]
I'm, well, yeah, I don't necessarily mean the classics there. What I mean is you have to be an omnivore. You have to be deeply curious about the written word.
You know, you have to read inside and outside of genres that you like personally. And that sort of curiosity component is so, so important whenever we were looking for somebody to bring on the team. That's the first quality.
And the second, once that was like checkbox, yep, she's got that. You know, the next question is, you know, do you have that sort of can-do mentality? Because as I said, if this is an apprenticeship, you're gonna have to learn by doing.
Things are gonna get thrown at you at a wicked pace that you will not, by definition, be able to keep up with. And that is not the point. You need to listen very carefully and make yourself useful.
People are so busy and it's only getting worse in publishing houses that the way in and the way to be effective as a new person is by taking some of the burden off the people already there who are so overworked, it's actually almost tragic. And if you can find a way to do that, you won't be let go.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, yeah. You'll be scared. You have to be fast and helpful, it sounds like.
And you said she's got that, so I'm assuming that. And sorry, my experience is that most people in publishing houses are women. I don't know if that's, I don't know if that sounds bad to say that, but.
[Nita Prose]
Well, it's the truth.
[Neil Pasricha]
All my editors have been women, I think, except for one exception. In every book I've done, we have two different editors at Chronicle, an editor at Putnam, an editor at Simon & Schuster, an editor at Penguin, Carrie Colan, who has also been on the show, Chapter 11. So it's like, my experience is almost all women.
[Nita Prose]
Is that, why is that? Well, I think there are a lot of historical and current reasons for that. And a lot of them have to do with pay and what people are willing to take in order to stay in the arts.
So, and that remains true, equity is still a major issue that we're battling. You know, the whole, you know, all of North America is battling with that issue in all kinds of ways with pay equity. And I think that was true, especially in Canada.
And we're getting better. We have a long way to go, but yeah.
[Neil Pasricha]
So you're saying editors and publishing apprentices, these jobs do not pay well. We should absolve people of the idea that these jobs make a living wage.
[Nita Prose]
Correct. It is definitely far below a living wage. And if you are willing to eat rice and beans for 10 years, you might get somewhere and make a living wage and actually be able to survive.
But that's what it takes now. And that's what it took them.
[Neil Pasricha]
Wow. That's a really rare combination of really high kind of curiosity, I'd say, intelligence, literacy, and some sense education, and certainly, you know, personal education combined with below living wage. Like it's just, you don't see that very much.
[Nita Prose]
Listen, these are highly intelligent people in publishing houses, whether they're male or female or everything in between. They run the gamut, but they are highly intelligent people who choose a career in the arts because for them, the benefits of being there outweigh the traumatic boredom of working in insurance and banking. And that was true of me, as it is true of so many of my long-time colleagues in this industry.
[Neil Pasricha]
Would we choose- Traumatic boredom.
[Nita Prose]
No, we would not choose anything else because- Oh my gosh, that is too funny. The proximity to books is the biggest gift and you make the sacrifice of monetary gain for that.
[Neil Pasricha]
Wow, a proximity to books. Yeah, that is a really fascinating way to think about it. And it's interesting too, because when I look at maps of bookstores and this is not maps of libraries, but maps of bookstores, they overlap with high-income neighborhoods almost perfectly.
And there's almost none in low-income neighborhoods. I mean, across Canada, I mean, across the US. Bookstores are, books are becoming more of a luxury good, you know, with $40 hardcovers.
I don't know what your new book will be priced at, but they're expensive. Yeah. They're expensive.
And again, I didn't say that takes away from the library, but libraries also seem to be going the other way where they're becoming like, at least in Toronto, they're becoming like places of warmth and rest and community and a place to like hang out, you know, if you need a place to hang out because we've closed a lot of our other in-between places. So we have this weird kind of thing happening in books that I'm seeing, at least from a distance.
[Nita Prose]
Yeah, I mean, I think libraries are so hugely important. And I hope that books stay at the heart of libraries. Although of course they also are acting and need to be acting as community hubs in all kinds of ways.
And there are some libraries that are so good at doing both and my goodness, I always find that, you know, ultra inspiring. Like you, I get to go to a lot of places. I get to go to visit a lot of libraries and I am wowed by some of them.
I was just in Bracebridge, Ontario at the Bracebridge Public Library.
[Neil Pasricha]
I have never- That's a small town, two hours North of Toronto.
[Nita Prose]
Yeah, small town in the Muskoka.
[Neil Pasricha]
Most famous for the Santa Claus. What's it called?
[Nita Prose]
Oh yeah, the, what is that?
[Neil Pasricha]
Santa's Village. It's most famous for the theme park.
[Nita Prose]
Right, and it's a vacation zone in the summertime. But we're talking a serious small town here. But they have the most incredible library.
Okay, you walk in and there is a skating rink to the side, as soon as you walk in. But in the distance you see this beautiful shelving, books, books, books, books, books, as far as the eye can see. There's a coffee shop.
You walk into the library and it's absolutely stunning. They've got all kinds of things around books. Books are at the center, don't get me wrong.
But they've got like a sewing room and a historical archives center within the library. And, you know, a podcast and music room where you can record. Yeah, like just outstanding.
And they're a library that just, it blew my mind. Their vision of what a library can be. Books at the center, but a community hub.
[Neil Pasricha]
And the skating rink is amazing. I mean, Austin Kleon, who wrote Steel Like an Artist was our guest in chapter 111 of the show. He has, I don't know if he created it, but he's really good at amplifying it.
And he may have created it called Library Tourism. And he talks about, you know, visiting libraries as a form of tourism. You're doing this as a form of vacation, like you're probably doing readings in the library and signings and so on.
But, you know, if you go to the Austin Library in Austin, Texas, it's got all these giant Lance Lester collages, the famous Calgary Library in Calgary, Alberta. Those that haven't known, it's like a masterpiece of modern art, the whole building. So I love this.
And I was gonna ask you later in the show what your favorite library is so we can pocket that one. But this Bracebridge one is sounding good.
[Nita Prose]
Sorry, I was gonna say in Canada so far, it's Lumen Large for me, that one.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, that's sounding wonderful. I do love when you bump into another library fan and they're like, what's your favorite branch? You know, I love that, because every branch has kind of its own vibe and aesthetic, you know?
There's this really great branch at DuPont in Perth where you walk in, it's so small, but the librarian has curated the front tables every day. And it's all these memorable statements about, you know, thinking like Tubman and marching like Malcolm and all these great like kind of activist visionaries. You come in, all the newspapers of the day are laid out and there's hardly any shelves, but beside the front desk where she sits is a whole wall of holds.
And the whole thing is like all holds. You're like, this library is kind of like a train station. Like everybody's running and now grabbing all their holds.
So, you know, the library shuttles from around all of Toronto are like delivering and dropping off books there every day in this really tiny, small space. It's anyway, it's amazing. That's a shout out to DuPont Perth Library.
[Nita Prose]
Absolutely.
[Neil Pasricha]
So you gave us three books, Nita, to talk to you about. Three books that helped shape you or guide you or inform you in some way. I am going to take a stab at starting with one of them, unless you had a preference on which one we started with.
[Nita Prose]
No, hit me.
[Neil Pasricha]
Okay. So I'm going to go from the earliest book kind of to most current. The first book published that you gave us, and I've kind of been kind of picking away because you gave us so many books.
A few of them are going to get asterisks. We're going to talk about that at the end where some other people picked them. But one of the books you gave us was Lord of the Flies by William Golding, published in 1954 by Faber and Faber.
The original covers like this dense jungle in black and yellow with tangled trees and oversized tropical foliage with small almost stick figures of boys scattered in an emotion, both naked and in low and cloth. Like there's a natural pen and ink like penis on the cover of this book, which I can imagine 1954 was like pretty bold. Yeah.
And it says simply Lord of the Flies in a sort of a giant title on screen in red and William Golding above it. This guy wrote 12 books, but no one's heard of any of the other 11. Like Lord of the Flies was his debut novel, 1954, won the Pulitzer Prize, he's known.
He lived from 1911 to 1993 in England. And it's about the dawn of the next world war. This plane crashes on an uncharted island, stranding a group of school boys.
At first, with no adults around, their freedom is something to celebrate, but then their attempts to forge their own society fall and fail in the face of terror, sin, and evil. Dewey Decimal Heads can file this book under 823.914 for Old English Literature from 1945 to 1999, Nita Prose. Please tell us about your relationship with Lord of the Flies by William Golding.
[Nita Prose]
You know, I love books that are allegorical and this one is very tricky because you can read it as, you know, just a novel like any other, but it is deeply, deeply an allegory. And I think we are all, it behooves us to think deeply about our dark side, that dark side that we have in us. And he was able to bring that alive in that book and warn us, you know, through the allegory of children about how dangerous that side of us can be.
And I think that's why it is so meaningful, you know, and it came at a time when he was, you know, this war was drumming, it was not a distant beat, it was very, very close. And so he used the vehicle of the novel to do something I think truly extraordinary and to create kinds of archetypes of boys, but they could be anybody, they could be any people, that remain deeply true and deeply powerful to this day.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, absolutely. I still remember reading it. I was assigned in 10th grade English class at Sinclair Secondary School in Whitby, Ontario in, I wanna say 1995 or 1996.
And I remember this book took me somewhere else and, you know, The Great Gatsby was the other assignment and I could have cared less about that book. I had no connection, but Lord of the Flies was like, I can't believe this is a signed read. Do the teachers know what it says?
They're rolling this boulder on this guy's head and they're, you know, like, do they know that this is in here?
[Nita Prose]
Ultraviolet.
[Neil Pasricha]
Very ultraviolet, ultraviolet. And you were what, a kid when you read this?
[Nita Prose]
Yeah, I think I was probably in grade seven and I remember it making- So this was like an assigned reading book? I don't think it was. I think it's something that I knew older kids than me were reading.
So I thought, well, I'm gonna read this because the older kids are reading it. And it had an impact. And I could, like, you know, I could read it.
Did I understand the allegorical nature of the book at that time? Not at all. But I recognized the characters and I recognized the good and bad in them.
You know, I saw the good in Ralph and I saw his deep struggle. And I also saw Jack and how he could so easily manipulate others and use fear against them, just like some people, some politicians are doing to this day.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, exactly.
[Nita Prose]
And that made an impact.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, how so?
[Nita Prose]
I was wary of the political world. And by, I don't necessarily mean politics in the bigger sphere, even in the smaller sphere, the politics of the world around me, the other kids. I became aware that you could choose.
You could choose to be good. You could choose to be kind. And you could also choose to be a menace.
That was up to you. And I think that book was a revelation because I don't think I'd ever thought before that that choice was my own.
[Neil Pasricha]
Wow. Well, what an insight for you to have, like, you know, 11, 12, 13 years old. You're reading a book kind of advanced for your age.
You're a young girl in, I wanna say, rural Ontario, about an hour and a half, two hours east of Toronto, right?
[Nita Prose]
Yep.
[Neil Pasricha]
Is that right? Kind of up near the Uxbridge area for those that may know it. Shout out to Blue Heron Books up there.
[Nita Prose]
Absolutely.
[Neil Pasricha]
With Shelly. Yeah, that's one of our gems. And that you could choose to be a menace, that you could kind of navigate the politics.
And I'm sort of hearing you say also kind of steer away from that, because, you know, by the way, publishing, you know, from an outsider's perspective, it's always been regarded to me as quite a political industry. Who you know, getting promoted, like a lot of things based on, I won't say things like, you know, your looks or your school or your upbringing, but even when I interviewed Amy Einhorn, she was like, I actually felt like an outsider coming from New Jersey and not going to a fancy school and being Jewish. Like she said, she felt like an outsider in politics.
And if she felt like an outsider in politics, you know, you can imagine that, you know, most people would feel like an outsider. And you would also suspect, and this is not the case because I know you very well, that an editor becoming a best-selling novelist, well, you must've had to know the right people, push the right buttons, get the right things done. People might say that.
But yeah, I know that's not your, I just know you so well, I know that's not your style, but how did you navigate the political atmosphere in an industry that's regarded as quite political?
[Nita Prose]
By just focusing on the work, which was always the reason I was there anyhow. You know, being with the author in their world gave me great solace and a sense of community. And all the things that infringed upon that were an impediment.
So I was always very protective of that, that that was our safe zone, that was our safe space. And that's where I wanted to be and to live and to grow with the authors I supported. And so, you know, when you focus on something enough, when you focus on the right thing, there's growth there.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah.
[Nita Prose]
Sometimes that growth can also act as a barrier and save you from the outside stuff that doesn't matter. You know?
[Neil Pasricha]
Well, yeah, I mean, if you're doing it the right way, I have a good friend that's like a number two in a giant company and I'm like, how do you navigate the politics? He's like, I just don't play the politics at all. And I was like, kind of shocked.
He's like, I only talk to people face to face. I don't do things over email and text message. I don't respond in the evenings.
I was like, no wonder you're successful. Like you're doing something different than most people. You called the book allegorical, which, you know, on a rough definition means a story or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one.
You've been open in past interviews about how you have kept elements of the made purposely vague, right? Like you don't ever say where the hotel is, even though readers come up to you all the time and say, I know that hotel, it's in Boston, or I know the hotel, it's in London. I've heard you say this in interviews.
So I'd like to go deeper into writing craft here for a second. And I do want to have the general question, which I'd love to ask you, which is, can you tell us about your writing routine? But then a level deeper is how do you do that?
Because to me as a nonfiction writer, that's a real magic trick that a lot of novelists and fiction writers have that I don't know how to do. How do you say enough without not saying too much? How do you decide where that line is?
How do you keep things purposely vague, but yet still shape things by things being unsaid? So I'm curious about your writing routine, and then specifically on allegory, how you are thinking about some of those little strings that you're pulling here.
[Nita Prose]
Yeah, I think I knew early on that the main series was an allegorical series. It was a fairy tale. I was inspired by fairy tales in genital and allegorical worlds like the Lord of the Flies and one of the other books that we're going to talk about in a bit.
So I knew that I was going to be living in that space. And it provides a kind of freedom from reality where inner truth or emotional truth becomes more important than fact. You know, I had a reader reach out to me yesterday, Neil, it was hilarious.
He was so pissed off. He was a lawyer and he was so pissed off that the rules of the legal world in The Maid, especially near the ending, do not match reality. So, you know, and I'm like, well, why would they?
And of course he offered his services, which is very, very kind. So next time I can pay- Oh my gosh. So he can fix my work.
And you know, so I wrote a kindly email back explaining that, you know, not everything that a novelist writes is meant to be a hard, cold fact. You know, that almost every novel in some way or another is allegorical. I also directed him to the novels of John Grisham.
If you like legal procedurals, that's your go-to guy. And he does a beautiful job of them. I love his books, but that's not what I'm trying to do.
I am creating a world where the heart speaks first. You know, where my idea and notion of this character looms so large that everything in the world will be sort of a reflection of her in some kind of way. And her emotional truth is the thing that matters most, not an obedience, an obedience to fact.
So that's what I was- That's amazing.
[Neil Pasricha]
What an articulate way to put that. That's so interesting.
[Nita Prose]
You know, and it's not like I'm discovering this. If you think of any fairy tale, that is also true, right? Any fairy tale.
[Neil Pasricha]
Of course. But how do you decide, you know, Gabriel Garcia Marquez famously kind of blew up the concept of magic realism, where he takes liberties with some elements of reality and doesn't take liberties with others. And I've always wondered how you decide which things to bend and which things not to.
I like that it's emotional truth first. So I get that as a North Star, but just putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, you're thinking as you're writing, tell me about those thoughts.
[Nita Prose]
Yeah, so rule number one for my world, in this world that I created, emotional truth. And then rule number two is what can I get away with believably where the reader can step into my experience and complete the picture? For me, that is an essential part of my writing process and it keeps me writing.
I'm constantly thinking how much is just enough to give and how much can I leave up to the reader to participate and complete my world? I am not the solo creator on high who's delivering a fait accompli on the page where you just read and devour my words and experience my brilliance. That is not what I'm doing.
I put as little as I can on the page. I take it away, I take it away, I strip down and down and down. And what is left, after my editors always ask me to add more, we'll talk about that process after, what is left leaves room, leaves marginalia, leaves all this space between the lines for the reader to add their experiences, their experience of hotels, of cities, of people like Molly, of jobs that they've done, of feeling isolated in the world, of feeling like they're in a party and they don't understand the social cues going on around them. All of it, I ask the reader to go there with me and complete the novel for me.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, wow, that's really amazing how you think about it so thoughtfully. And of course, I'm obviously thinking about Lord of the Flies. He doesn't say where the boys are from, where they're going, where that island is.
It's like, that's unimportant.
[Nita Prose]
No, no, because there's enough on the page that we believe, and belief is the second thing, right? How much can I give you that allows you to bring in your own experience so that it feels believable to you? And I mean, Golding did it so beautifully.
We see that island, we know those boys, we know Simon, we know that seer. You know, when they come with fruit on their face, we can feel that sticky fruit on our own, feel that hunger that we felt, you know? So many things about that book ask you to step in and live with the boys, you know?
[Neil Pasricha]
This is, I have so many questions here on Lord of the Flies still, but we're talking about editing and writing, and I want to just keep that open as we kind of transition, and I want to just bring it up because it's so related to Life of Pi. So Life of Pi by Yann Martel, very similarly, massively allegorical and metaphorical with lots of things said and unsaid. Of course, it is a novel, although the book opens with a declaration of it being true.
You know, it's this really beautiful construct, which I'd love you to talk about a little bit more. Published in 2001 by Knopf Publishing, covers a deep red to yellow gradient with a pen and ink drawing of a growling tiger's face above a more abstract series of cresting ocean waves and seven green flying fish jumping up in a perfect arch. Yann Martel is across the top in a title case serif above a very large Life of Pi, Pi is P-I, written in a very unique, almost inky calligraphic pen by an eight-year-old type of writing.
It's a very unique writing in white across the deep red top with a novel written very lightly, almost playfully invisible right below that. And there's something there about that I'd like you to open up. Yann Martel is a Canadian author, though he was born in 1963 in Spain.
I think he now lives in Saskatchewan. This is his second novel after a first one that he really doesn't like and says he wishes, is terrible and wishes it would disappear called Self. And then he wrote two since, Virgil in 2010 and High Mountains of Portugal in 2016.
So this is like his standup book. This is a 12 million copy selling book. It's a philosophical adventure about the extraordinary story of Paisin Patel, nicknamed Pi, a young Indian boy who survives a shipwreck while emigrating to Canada with his family.
Stranded on a lifeboat in the Pacific, Pi finds himself sharing a small vessel with several wild animals, including a Bengal tiger for 227 days, all while grappling with questions of spirituality, truth, and reality. Files under 813.54. This is American literature in English. So Dewey Decimal's got this way wrong.
This doesn't have a Canadian literature proper section, right? Couldn't dig it up properly. 1945 to 1999, this is off on the Dewey.
But tell us about your relationship with Life of Pi, the 2002 novel from Yann Martel.
[Nita Prose]
It blew my mind in so many ways. And the fact that he was Canadian was also just immeasurably wonderful. It was such an international novel, you know, in so many ways.
But Canada as a place is very much a part of that novel, which, you know, rereading it recently, I was like, oh yeah, oh yeah, it's there.
[Neil Pasricha]
It takes place in Montreal with this backstory to the journalist, right?
[Nita Prose]
Yeah, exactly. And there are all these allusions to, you know, places we know well. It blew my mind because it looks like that description that you just read.
It looks like it's one thing. It looks like a lifeboat story of survival. And it is something entirely different.
And what a frigging magic trick that is. This is a book about storytelling. It's all about storytelling.
It's about the truth in fiction, which is something that rivets me, that fascinates me, and that I will be thinking and talking about and writing about for the rest of my days. You know, we go through that story thinking this is, you know, that Pi is recounting a story that happened to him, knowing that there are a few things that do not seem like fact. And we come to the end of the story, and in fact, he gives us a choice.
He gives us a choice to consider the story he just told, this fable that includes, you know, life on a raft with wild animals, or another story that might involve real people on a boat. And which do you choose? The one I just told you, or the one that I didn't?
And I think that the book finally is a definition of the importance of a novel and the importance of story. Because sometimes through the metaphor of story, there can be greater truth than in fact. And the whole novel is a treatise that argues it.
[Neil Pasricha]
What a masterpiece. I read this book in one day. It's probably the only book in my entire life I've ever read in one day, partly because in 2002, there was this cute girl at the office I was working at, and she told me it was her favorite book, and I really desperately wanted to go back the next day and say, I read it last night, you know?
And it was easy to do because the book, like, took me from 5 p.m. to 3 a.m., and I just read it all the way through. It was so captivating.
[Nita Prose]
Yes.
[Neil Pasricha]
And then when the Ang Lee movie came out afterwards, it was also really good.
[Nita Prose]
That was a good film adaptation for sure. A film is never the book. It is not the same thing.
But that one had a certain high level of faithfulness to what that book was trying to do, and I think it's admirable and enviable too.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, and he won Best Director at the Oscars for it. If you haven't seen the movie, Life of Pi, that's also a potential way in if you haven't read the book. So we were talking, though, about editing, writing, writing routines.
What is your writing routine?
[Nita Prose]
Well, I write early in the morning, and the reason why is because I had a very big full-time job. So for me to carve out time for myself to write, I had to get up at 4.30, 5.30, or 5 a.m., and start writing then. And use the best of my brain for myself.
[Neil Pasricha]
So I got in the practice of that when I- Like you set an alarm for 5 a.m. to write?
[Nita Prose]
Yeah, absolutely. So I did that for some time, and it became my practice. I will reserve those early morning hours, which are dark, when there's no noise in the house, your phone isn't going off like crazy, there are no emails going about.
It's a liminal time for me. It's this time that, for me, is still halfway in the dream world. And for me, that gives me psychological space.
It allows me to not obsess with my own dark thought. You can't do this. Who do you think you are?
All those thoughts are still sleeping, you know?
[Neil Pasricha]
Really? So your doubt is lower in the morning, in the liminal space? I wonder why that- Absolutely.
I mean, sorry, I'm not saying you should have doubts, but for me, that would not be the case. I would still have doubts.
[Nita Prose]
For me, there's an attachment to the dream world that moves me closer to the realm of story. Oh, wow. And that's a deep connection.
I feel rooted there, and I feel like I can dance on a page.
[Neil Pasricha]
I love this, and I'm gonna probe on this a little bit. So you're setting alarm for 5 a.m., you have a partner who remains sleeping.
[Nita Prose]
No, we don't live together.
[Neil Pasricha]
Oh, you don't live together?
[Nita Prose]
We live in separate houses. You are absolute freaks of nature.
[Neil Pasricha]
No, it's not absolute freaks of nature. I've heard this is a wonderful way to spend your life, and I've, by the way, thought about it multiple times. It makes a lot of sense to me.
So you're in a long-term relationship, and you have separate houses. So, because I heard that you wrote the whole first book without telling him, that's why I was gonna ask you.
[Nita Prose]
I did. I mean, even when we spend weekends together, and I would be writing in the morning, and I would be lying about what I was doing, it took me a very, very long time to confess to anybody, because I wanted, I didn't want my doubts or anyone else's you-can-do-it-kid sort of energies to influence me at all, and it was back to what we just talked about about publishing. Do the work.
Just sit and do the work. It is the only thing that mattered. I didn't want anything else interfering with my ability to do the work.
[Neil Pasricha]
Wow, okay, so I'm loving this, because you didn't tell people because you didn't want neither their doubts nor their encouragements to affect you in any way, including your life partner, who you don't live with, which makes it easier to hide, but you still didn't tell him for the whole year or two or more that you were writing the book. Yeah. That was like a total secret.
[Nita Prose]
Yep, nobody knew.
[Neil Pasricha]
Why do writers do that? Why do writers always do this? Like Lewis Sacker, one of my heroes growing up, who wrote sideways stories from Wayside School.
You know, he was our guest in chapter 70, and he said he only tells his wife or his kid when he's done a book, and half of them, when he's done, he throws them away without showing them even.
[Nita Prose]
I get it.
[Neil Pasricha]
The other half, he like, what's up with that?
[Nita Prose]
I totally get it. There's a part of me, I can't speak for anyone else, but there's a part of me that becomes very plastic and malleable, fragile, and flexible in that creative state. And I want to be the only person manipulating in that state.
[Neil Pasricha]
I don't want anyone else- Not only want, you maybe need to be the only one in order for the work to be accurate.
[Nita Prose]
Right, in order for that to really deeply listen to what that idea that I'm trying to shape is trying to tell me what it wants to be, how I am going to do this. I have to block out all noise. And for me, the noise tends to be very binary noise.
You can't do this, you suck. Or you're amazing, you've got all this experience. It's all just a fricking circus.
None of it is either side of it. And it's not going to help me with the work.
[Neil Pasricha]
No, and in fact, it adds a weird pressure too, because now if you abandon a project or change a project, you have to like tell seven people that you found it last time.
[Nita Prose]
I failed, it sucked. Yeah, like no.
[Neil Pasricha]
But how do you, so I get this, because for me, it's not a totally clear metaphor, but I almost picture growing off my body when I'm writing some sort of fragile, like dragonfly wing or little antenna and any amount of touching in any way, whether that's helpful or hindering, it just crushes that, it crushes that antenna or that wing. And so, because writing is really hard and it's very challenging, and so you have to be in the zone. You have to forget where time is.
You have to forget that anyone could judge it or anyone could read it in order for it to be good. But then I guess the follow-up question is, this is related because Golding, like I said, wrote 11 books after. The first one's got 3 million reviews on Goodreads.
All the rest have like 3000. Like no one read any of his other 11 books. Yann Martel, don't mean to say anything negative about him, but Beatrice and Virgil and these other books, no one, like just on relative terms, Life of Pi sold 12 million copies.
These other ones sold like not even a fraction of that. And now you're much more public. It's impossible for you not to hear the world saying, when's the next Molly book coming out?
Or I want something different from you. Or how's it going on the writing? Like now what?
Like you're kind of post that being possible. Presumably now your life partner knows you're writing every morning. So what now?
How do you navigate that now?
[Nita Prose]
Well, I still practice the same way I always did. I get up a little later because I no longer have a day job that starts at nine, but I still practice in the morning. I write in the morning.
It's the best time for me. It's when I can write the most. It's when my brain is freshest and cleanest.
And that really helps a lot to keep the practice and keep the focus on the work, no matter what. So again, there's new noise, right? It's not just my noise anymore.
It's everybody else's. But the fact that I did that and that I have done it as an editor for so many years too, blocking the rest out and just focusing on what needs to be done, the creative work to be done.
[Neil Pasricha]
For me, that's- I really want to... Yeah, this is amazing and you're good at it. And the work speaks for itself and the books have done really well and they're striking a lot of people and you're continuing to write them.
And I know you've also spoken about how you want to write different stuff as well. And you wake up at five. When are you sitting at the laptop?
Is the laptop connected to the internet? What software are you using? I just want to know a little bit more detail here.
So what happens? You wake up, but you walk over to like, are you like mid-sentence like Hemingway? What's happening in the world here?
[Nita Prose]
No, I have to eat first because I'm really skinny. So I eat, I get coffee in me and then I get to work usually. I'll work for a while.
I'll take the dog out afterwards. I'll work for a while. But you know, when I'm really in the flow on a good day, 12 hours can go by and I can barely notice.
Like, yeah, okay, I'll ingest some food and I'll take a break here and there. But when you're in it, in it, in it, it's the only place... Well, when I'm in it, in it, in it, the only place I want to be is right there.
Now those are rare, but they must be addictive. Somebody should like, you know, attach some probes to a writer's brain to see what's happening. Actually what's firing in there on a good day, because it is the biggest rush in the world.
And it's so rare.
[Neil Pasricha]
What is a good day for you? And I don't mean that 12 hour sort of thousands of words explosion. What's your minimum effect?
Like, what's your minimum threshold? When do you let yourself off the hook? The day is done and it was good.
What is that for you?
[Nita Prose]
Oh, well, it can be different things. So I'm talking about one of those real flow days where I am the characters, I'm living them. I'm seeing it.
It's a technicolor movie that's playing with such ease that I almost, I need my hands to type faster to get it all down. And it's wonderful. Those days are wonderful.
They're very rare. Other days don't look like that at all. And I will let myself off the hook when I feel I've done something.
And that can be a different thing on a different day. I can sit for eight hours and not type a single character, but I can have done so much work in my head. Now it's hard to give my, I'm still learning to give myself credit for those days because I will sometimes walk away and think I did nothing.
But I've learned now through repetition that that day of stasis and me going over and over and trying to find a moment or trying to find a particular scene or relationship in my head means eventually something's gonna crack and it's gonna come open. And I'll see that those eight hours I spent, I wasn't doing nothing.
[Neil Pasricha]
I was- You will sit at your computer for eight hours without typing a character, really?
[Nita Prose]
Yep. Someday.
[Neil Pasricha]
And what are you looking at?
[Nita Prose]
So I, because I know the character needs to go from here to here. And I know I need this cast of characters to get them there. I know globally what I'm trying to achieve.
I know what I'm achieving in this chapter, but I have to make it all happen inside somebody's head because I'm a very first person writer. And then I can write it down. And so sometimes those days, frustrating as they are, it's kind of like I'm writing a rewriting in my own head before I can put it together.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, this is so interesting. And the voices in your head that you're navigating, that you're able to sit with, the patience that's required to do that. So in Life of Pi, Pi's parents die in the opening scene, right?
You have spoken in the past about how Molly's recently deceased grandmother is the voice of your recently deceased mom, if I have it right. In fact, you said on the Kobo and Conversation podcast, my mom is more with me in death than she is when she was alive. I was wondering, what do you mean by that?
And also for those navigating the last stages of their parents' lives, my dad is 80, my mom is 75. You've met both of them multiple times. For someone who's lost a parent, what advice do you give people that are navigating the last chapter?
[Nita Prose]
I don't give advice. That's for you to do.
[Neil Pasricha]
That's my job.
[Nita Prose]
I don't give advice. All I can do is give story. Yeah, so it's funny the way that novels work.
You can think you're writing about characters that are so remote from you. And certainly I thought that the characters in the Maze series have nothing to do with me. And the last one that has anything to do with me is Molly.
I mean, come on, my social cues are impeccable. How could you think of anything like her? But you discover as you write that you might be a little bit more like your characters than you think.
So no, it is not me. Yes, it is me. Yes, it is you.
If I've done my job right. And that is something that I've learned from this journey with that character, is a character that I thought was nothing like me, so different from me. Turns out I was dead wrong.
And also that that character is everyone. I've learned that from the many, many readers who come up to me and say, that is me. That is my husband.
That is my friend. That is my sister. That is my mother.
That is a kid I teach. So if you see yourself in Molly, that's because she's no different from any of us. She has dreams and hopes.
She has griefs and failures and setbacks. She tries to do her absolute best, sometimes fails at it. And sometimes is hugely, beautifully successful too.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah. And you sold me bluntly and I hear you that you don't offer advice, but you were open about sharing that a grandmother character is a bit of a reflection of your mom whose voice you still hear. You said you're closer with your mom in death than you were in life, which by the way, when I heard that sentence, I took great solace and comfort in that.
That felt good to me to hear. Because I always worry about saying the wrong thing or ruining their day now and near the end of their life because we got into an argument about something or whatever. And so that's what I was asking for.
Maybe you could share it through story. Was there something that happened near the end of your mom's life that you could tell us about or something that you remember as a particularly good day or moment?
[Nita Prose]
Oh my goodness, there are so many. I mean, my mother died of Alzheimer's. So there was a long, long while that was incredibly challenging and challenged me to the core.
Although that experience as it turns out was deeply and profoundly moving. But the notion of losing somebody in pieces, of going through a very prolonged death, a 10 year death with someone where you lose them bit by bit by bit. It is really one of those impossible griefs.
And the mother I remember before she was ill, her voice, and I did not expect this. I thought when I lost her in pieces, I would never have that voice in my head again. Like I would never hear it the way she was present and such a clear navigating force.
My mother was not somebody who wavered. She knew what to do. She always knew her.
She was shameless and she was direct. And she was one of these persons who you'd be walking with somewhere and you'd think she would know where she's going because she was walking with such purpose. She has no idea where she's going, but she was an incredibly purposeful person in every possible way.
And so when I lost her, I just thought a part of me is lost forever. Like I'll never have that again. And that was such a relief to find out how wrong I was.
When she died, it was like I found a distillation of her in my head and in my heart. I could hear her. I hear her all the time when I'm lost, when I'm confused, when I'm down, that voice will come at me.
I'll just hear it in my head or I'll just feel that presence, that directness, that force. You can see it right now. I'm looking at myself in this camera and I'm not seeing myself.
I'm seeing her. And to have that gift and to realize how profound it is that you can lose someone that you are so attached to physically in this life and discover that they're not actually gone. Wow.
You may be, and I don't mean it in the woo-wee way. I mean that you might be able to create a distillation of that person that is as meaningful or maybe even more than they were in real life.
[Neil Pasricha]
Because in real life- It's not like you're recording them or anything. No. You're not like watching old videos or tapes.
[Nita Prose]
No, I've got so little. I have like two little videos, two little snips of my mother from the past. And they're the most precious things to me.
But that's all I've got. All I've got are my memories and that voice which lives in my head.
[Neil Pasricha]
And I wanted to give back- Yeah, there's something to that though. Yeah, I wanted to- There's something, it's almost allegorical, right? Because these days when you can create a GPT version of your recently deceased friend based on all the emails they ever sent you, here we are trying to create Frankenstein sort of thing.
And what you have is so little, but as a result, your memory is really suffused with color as a result of that.
[Nita Prose]
It's essentialized. It really is a distillation of the best of her and all of the other things gone.
[Neil Pasricha]
Essentialized, wow, that's a great word.
[Nita Prose]
I think I just made that up.
[Neil Pasricha]
No, I love it. I love it. You've got a great vocabulary.
I've been writing down words the whole time. So, Life of Pi, allegorical nature, metaphor, themes about editing and writing we've opened up. Let's transition now to your third book.
And I know you've given me four and five. So we could keep going, but let's just move now to this wonderful book that I have here right in front of me. Where is it?
Here it is, Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. O-W-E-N-S. And I'm struggling to find my little piece of paper about it so I can read.
Oh, here it is. Published in 2018 by G.P. Putnam and Sons, covers a warm pink sunset landscape of tall trees rising over a watery marsh with a small figure in a boat on the water. There's a sunny yellow Reese's Book Club sticker in the top left.
The title is a centered all caps on there for the one word on each line. Where the Crawdads Sing. It's a number one New York Times bestseller.
And the NYT book review across the bottom says, painfully beautiful, at once a murder mystery, a coming of age narrative and a celebration of nature. Delia Owens was born in Georgia in 1949. She's an American author, zoologist and conservationist.
She actually wrote three non-fiction books about her time in Africa before this debut novel. Cry of the Kalahari, Eye of the Elephant, Secrets of the Savannah. And this story, this novel, this debut, almost all debuts here.
Yann Martel calls this his debut because he doesn't like the first one he wrote. Rumors of a marsh girl have haunted a North Carolina coastal town, Barkley Cove, for years. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kaya Clark, the so-called marsh girl.
But Kaya's not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and the lessons and the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved when two young men from town become intrigued by her wild beauty.
Kaya opens herself up to a new life until the unthinkable happens. File this one under 813.6 for American Fiction in English. Nita, tell us about your relationship with Where the Crawdad Sings by Delia Owens.
[Nita Prose]
Well, the thing about being an editor is that it's sometimes hard to turn off your editorial brain. So you're reading a book and you're like, oh, that, why? And you know, you've got these quibbles.
So you're like, maybe this book could have been better if this chapter worked this way, or why did they make this decision to do this that way? And it's really goddamn annoying to have that, have your reading experience interrupted by your editorial self. So when I can find a book where I'm completely and absolutely transported, and my editorial self is subsumed by the most incredible storytelling that I am just in it and not thinking of it, that's a rare thing indeed.
And I felt that with Where the Crawdad Sing. I was transported, I was captivated. I could not think, I could barely breathe.
It was so lyrical, so good, and so many things at the same time, some of which you just said, it's a murder mystery. It's historical fiction. It is an elegy to a world and a place and a time and a setting that is vanishing.
It is a beautiful look at the power of the landscape, both to heal and to harm, something that infinitely interests me. And at the center, we have this one human being, Kaya, this girl, this so-called swamp girl, who is so different and so socially ostracized and has had a pretty rough life, who is more in tune with the spiritual world and who she is than anyone else around her. And that, all of that, the cornucopia of that drew me to this novel so powerfully.
I think it is a real masterwork in so many ways.
[Neil Pasricha]
So you read Lord of the Flies when you were like seventh grade.
[Nita Prose]
Yeah.
[Neil Pasricha]
12 years old. You read, I'm guessing, Life of Pi, I'm assuming in your 20s, maybe?
[Nita Prose]
Yeah, well- Or 30s? It came out 2001, you said?
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, 2002, yeah.
[Nita Prose]
Yeah, so yeah, I was an adult.
[Neil Pasricha]
And it was a phenomenon, and you were in presumably Canadian publishing at the time, and it was the biggest book out of the country in years.
[Nita Prose]
Yeah, for me, I read it fast. I mean, I read it when it came out, yeah. Yeah.
[Neil Pasricha]
And then this book came out in 2018, so this is a more recent book for you. It's sort of, I'm assuming, before you started writing the Molly the Maid series, but not much before that.
[Nita Prose]
No, I think I read it in 2019. I think I had already started The Maid at that point, and then it spoke to me powerfully because I knew enough about the voice that I was going for with Molly that there were some similarities in these two characters who were alone in the world for various reasons.
[Neil Pasricha]
And I'm assuming you don't know the editor of this book, where the crowd heads thing, or do you?
[Nita Prose]
Maybe I do, and I've forgotten. Who's their editor?
[Neil Pasricha]
Well, because this is one thing I was going to ask you about editing, is that when it comes to movies, we all know who the director is. We don't see the director on screen, though we know that they're behind the scenes kind of controlling and crafting this entire thing. But with editing, other than the Amy Einhorn book club challenge, which was an online phenomenon when I wrote The Book of Awesome, and people were collectively tracking and following this editor, Amy Einhorn, and they were reading, you know, The Help, and The Postmistress, and The Book of Awesome, and all these, The Weird Sisters, and all these books that she edited as a unified force.
But there's never been a way you can read who the editor is inside of a book. It doesn't ever say that anywhere, usually other than the acknowledgements. It's a puzzle.
It's like this invisible force that's truly invisible. So why is that?
[Nita Prose]
I just looked, and it's Tara Singh Carlson at Putnam.
[Neil Pasricha]
How do you look it up? How do you look up editors?
[Nita Prose]
I looked at the acknowledgements, and she's there.
[Neil Pasricha]
Uh-huh, uh-huh, okay. You looked at the acknowledgements, okay.
[Nita Prose]
I know of her. I do not know her.
[Neil Pasricha]
No, no, no, and that's kind of what I was asking about, because of course, chapter 140, we did interview Amy Einhorn. You and Amy Einhorn are the only two people in the entire world who edit two or more of my books, so I feel a special kinship and connection with both of you, and I feel really flattered that I've had both of you on the show, as well as Kerry Colan in chapter 11, who edited The Happiness Equation. So it's like, I guess the other, the editors of my own books feel obliged to say yes when I ask them, but I did ask Amy what she would ask you.
I asked Amy what she would ask you before coming to chat with you today, and she wrote to me last night, oh, I would be so curious what Nita's biggest surprise was on being on the other side of the equation as a writer, and what's the biggest mistake editors do with dealing with authors that she would not have realized? Question mark, question mark, all lowercase, as Amy always writes to me.
[Nita Prose]
Yeah, all right, well, well, Amy, let me tell you. You know, I think I learned just how vulnerable it is to write. I always knew it because for decades, I was faced with people, writers in front of me who behaved with such vulnerability and weakness at times, not in a bad way, but you could tell that they were in a state that made them just, they certainly weren't invincible.
And that always made me very careful about what I said and how I said it. But now that I've had that experience of being on the other side, I really know that lived experience, how vulnerable you feel as a writer, how different it is from being the editor on high, looking down into that maze of story and knowing how to get the author through versus being the person in front of the labyrinth and not knowing which way to go to get yourself through that maze of story. And so I have a newfound appreciation for the guts it takes to write every single time.
And I don't think it really matters how many books you have under your belt for a lot of us, anyhow, that vulnerability is almost a necessary state for the act of writing.
[Neil Pasricha]
And- Maybe it gets harder, even not easier.
[Nita Prose]
Maybe for some, maybe for some. Or it becomes more familiar, maybe.
[Neil Pasricha]
And yet- I find that it's harder for me because it's like the stuff I like is better than I used to read. And so now I'm comparing what I write to... Oh yeah, that's- I don't know, I feel a bigger gap between what I'm writing and what I wanna be writing than I ever have.
[Nita Prose]
Right, right, right, right. Well, that's a sign of growth. And it means you're not writing the same book twice, which is great, I would say.
Otherwise, if you've already written it, why write it again? Why? You don't wanna do that.
You wanna do something new. And in terms of mistakes that editors make now seeing it from the other side, it's so funny because when you're working in a big publishing house, you're talking about your books and your authors all friggin' day long. You're talking to people about them.
You're working on their copy all day long. You're devoted to them. And sometimes it seems to me, now being on the other side, is that the editors forget to tell the writers and their agents that they are doing that.
So they've skipped ahead sort of three steps or they haven't sort of revealed their process because they're doing it. And they forget that they're not doing it with you because you're so present with them.
[Neil Pasricha]
So what's the problem with that? You're saying that the writers then think that the editors kind of forgot about them and isn't in touch with them enough.
[Nita Prose]
Forgot about them or something happens and they've told everybody except the author, all of these sort of things that can happen in publishing. And now I know why they happen. It's because in the inside the publishing house, you are thinking constantly and doing constantly.
And sometimes it feels as though the writer is right there with you when in fact, no, they are not. Sometimes they're in a different country, in a different side zone, doing a different thing in a different moment and one needs to communicate. So I would be hyper aware if I went back to editing, not that that's then the plans, but if I went back to an in-house job, I would be so hyper aware of that now.
Hey, do you know what I did today? I wrote some copy. Hey, I had a conversation with so-and-so about like, I would really do that so that the author feels and remember is that you're there, you're doing it.
You're in it.
[Neil Pasricha]
I like what you just said also a minute ago before jumping in this question, which is you wanna do something new. You wanna do something new. So you're on sequel number four?
[Nita Prose]
No, I'm done the series.
[Neil Pasricha]
It's over.
[Nita Prose]
It's done.
[Neil Pasricha]
So you're writing, when you say you have a new book coming out, you mean not a Molly the Maid book.
[Nita Prose]
I do.
[Neil Pasricha]
Aha, and you don't wanna talk about that obviously.
[Nita Prose]
Sure, I'll talk about the novel and yeah, happily. So yeah, I feel like the maid secret is the natural close. Maybe I will write another Molly novel one day, but I also want to do other things.
I want to explore other voices. And so I'm doing that now. The next book is quite different.
It is a mystery. It is anything but cozy. It is also a thriller.
It is set in a real place-ish. You know, it's set in the Muskoka's kind of. The lake is a mystery lake.
It's not a lake that actually exists, but it's up in that area. It's in a definable place, a country known as Canada. And it's about an older woman.
She's in her eighties. She's not doing so hot, but she's hanging in. She's lived by that lake for a very long time and she has a long history there.
And her grandkids come up one day and they go out into the woods. They're traipsing about and they come back to the lodge with something that was supposed to remain buried forever. And that changes the trajectory of the main character's life and the years that she has left in some major ways.
So that's the present tense story. The past, we go back to 1950s in the Muskoka's, very different time from the Muskoka's that exist today. A pioneering time with land grabs and this attempt to build the North American dream on a lake.
And we meet the protagonist when she was a young girl coming of age and her beautiful, ethereal, mysterious sister. And the two stories between past and present entwine quite a lot. And it's a story about memory.
It's a story about loss. It's a story about how a family relationship can continue on well past the bounds of death. And it's also very much what I said about the other book I was talking about, about landscape.
It's about the ability of the natural world to heal and to harm. And in Canada, those great places where you never quite know what nature is going to choose.
[Neil Pasricha]
You never quite know what nature is going to choose.
[Nita Prose]
Yeah. Are they going to heal you? Is it going to heal you or is it going to harm you?
You know? And I think our problems come about as human beings when we forget that.
[Neil Pasricha]
Wow.
[Nita Prose]
So that's what I'm on about.
[Neil Pasricha]
So you're now, this is a different tack than you used to take where now you're openly talking about, I know it's high level and it's vague, but this doesn't influence your writing process to talk about it now?
[Nita Prose]
No, not, no, it's fine. I couldn't talk about it at a certain point, but now I can say that knowing that I, you know, I'm keeping enough to myself. I'm keeping the precious pieces that I've yet to figure out.
[Neil Pasricha]
And it's probably late enough in the process where it feels pretty baked. You're telling us about the turkey before it comes out of the oven, not before it goes in kind of thing.
[Nita Prose]
Exactly, exactly.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, okay. How do you measure success?
[Nita Prose]
I measure success by writing a story that moves me dot, dot, dot, and hopefully moves some other people.
[Neil Pasricha]
In that order. That's a great way.
[Nita Prose]
Only if this happens can the second be possible.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, and the dot, dot, dot was key kind of thing. You do thoughtfully and consciously place yourself as the primary reader.
[Nita Prose]
Yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, exactly, that's so fascinating. Okay, lots of places we could go from here. However, I have thought that today may be a good time for me to experiment with our all new, brand new, long form series of fast money round closing questions if you're up for it.
[Nita Prose]
Let's do it.
[Neil Pasricha]
Okay, hardcover, paperback, audio, or e?
[Nita Prose]
Hardcover. The book is a great technology. It's just great.
It works. You open it, it works. I love it.
And hardcover, you know, there's something, something that lasts. It feels permanent and it feels like an objet, you know, a really beautifully designed book. I mean, it's funny, it's interesting because you're talking about the covers of these books.
The cover matters. It's part of it. And so, yeah, I am very attached to a beautiful hardcover.
Yeah.
[Neil Pasricha]
I love that. Yeah, it's more of an objet. I like that.
That's great. How do you organize the books on your own personal bookshelf?
[Nita Prose]
They're a hot mess, as you can see behind me.
[Neil Pasricha]
Well, I see lots of made copies and versions and so on.
[Nita Prose]
Yeah, but like over there, those are a lot of books that I've edited, not all of them, but that's a chunk of things that I've edited or have some sort of connection with. They're not very well organized. They're organized more according to mood than to anything else, you know?
[Neil Pasricha]
Do you have a hard time finding books or are you kind of intuitive to know where they are?
[Nita Prose]
When I was looking for these ones, you know, when I was looking for the Where the Crawdads Sing, I expected it in a certain pile and it was on another pile. And then I wonder what, I was like, oh yeah, of course it would be in that pile. It's right beside The Prayer for Owen Meany.
Of course it is. Of course it is.
[Neil Pasricha]
Oh, interesting. Oh, why is it obviously beside A Prayer for Owen Meany?
[Nita Prose]
A Prayer for Owen Meany was a very meaningful book for me. And it was a great big tome. They're both hardcovers.
And so, you know, there's something about the way my hand works that those two needed to be close to each other because they were formative.
[Neil Pasricha]
Wow. Wow, okay, cool. That's cool.
What is your book lending policy?
[Nita Prose]
Well, that is another problem. So I have in front of me The Lord of the Flies and Where the Crawdads Sing, but I don't have Life of Pi because I lent it to someone and I don't know who and I'm not going to get it back.
[Neil Pasricha]
So I will lend- And you won't, yeah, you won't get that version back.
[Nita Prose]
No, I won't get, and that doesn't really matter to me. And I'm not one of these people who's precious about books. They are coffee stained and dog-eared and dirty.
Like, I don't know if, can you see that's fine?
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, I can see that. I can see that. Yeah, you've got writing on the outside of Lord of the Flies.
[Nita Prose]
Grotesque. Do I care? I do not care.
I like well-loved books. And so I will happily give people books. And if they write on them, all the better.
[Neil Pasricha]
Nice. As David Mitchell told us in chapter 58, if I was a book, I'd want to be used.
[Nita Prose]
Yeah.
[Neil Pasricha]
Do you have a favorite bookstore, living or dead?
[Nita Prose]
Well, you mentioned one of them in Uxbridge, Blue Heron.
[Neil Pasricha]
Blue Heron Books is a classic.
[Nita Prose]
I love Shelley who runs that store and who runs some of the greatest events we have in this region.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, no, she's an event queen. She's really, and she's really become a great books evangelist and reading evangelist for a lot of people, including me. At my very first ever event, the Whippy Public Library in 2010, she was the bookseller.
And she still remembers that and says, I was so grateful for your mom for buying 10 copies of your book when I'd only sold four up until that point.
[Nita Prose]
I gotta start somewhere.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, you gotta start somewhere. Is there one book that comes to mind if I ask what you have re-read, re-read the most?
[Nita Prose]
Oh, probably David Copperfield.
[Neil Pasricha]
Ah, David Copperfield, I never read that book. I think you'd like it. Where do you most like to read or do you have a perfect reading setting?
[Nita Prose]
I can read in many, many different places. I like to read in bed. I sometimes will wake up in the middle of the night and I'm like, great, I get to read now, I'm awake.
But yeah, I can read in a lot of places.
[Neil Pasricha]
When you said you don't cohabitate with your partner, I was sort of like, I can excitedly respond to that because I see a lot of sense in that. And then one thing that happens with Leslie and I, because we do live together and sleep together is like the reading at night thing. It's like, is she going to bed?
Does she have her blindfold? Am I using the lamp? Should I use my little nightlight?
Am I gonna try to turn pages really carefully and quietly? There's a whole orientation between us while reading at night.
[Nita Prose]
Yeah, yeah, that's tricky. So I do not have to worry about that. I can just turn the light on and read to my heart's content and disturb nobody.
But yeah, I can read anywhere. I used to love to read on public transit. I don't take a lot of public transit these days because I do not have to commute to any workplace.
And I love to read on planes and in airports. You too, don't you?
[Neil Pasricha]
Nice. Yeah, I know. I'm still a no Wi-Fi person on airplanes, although it's getting harder and harder because they've made it so ubiquitous now that you just, everyone's kind of plugging in.
[Nita Prose]
So holding out, I'm trying hard.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, I know, I'm the same as you. Is there a book that comes to mind if I ask you what you've given as a gift, maybe two, three or more times?
[Nita Prose]
Oh, geez. Well, A Prayer for Almini, for sure, is a book that I've given.
[Neil Pasricha]
Who do you give that to? Like, what's that a good, who's that a good book for?
[Nita Prose]
It's the book you give anyone. You can give it to your uncle and your friend and you're anybody. It's almost impossible not to like that book.
So I find that for a gift of a book where you don't know somebody all that well and you, but you want to give them something substantive, something meaningful, that's a very good one.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, absolutely. Is there a living author that you're most excited for when they have a new release?
[Nita Prose]
I'm pretty darn excited right now about Atwood's memoir. Let me tell you about that.
[Neil Pasricha]
Oh, really? Tell me about it.
[Nita Prose]
I am halfway through it and I cannot, it's all I want to do. All I want to do is keep reading it. It is, it is, it is so generous and sharp, which is not at all surprising given it's author.
[Neil Pasricha]
You're talking about, so Margaret Atwood, we're speaking in late 2025. This conversation will probably come out early 2026, just because we published on the full moons. And Margaret Atwood has just in the sort of, you would argue the late stages of her career and life.
What is she in her late eighties? Yep. And she's just put out her first ever memoir.
[Nita Prose]
Of this style, yes, like a true memoir. This is my life story, book of lives, yes. And it is illuminating.
It is a history of life in the arts. It's a history of Canadian publishing and books. It is an inside look at how an artist is created, or it's also a nature versus nurture kind of book, like which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Is, when I say generous, something that is boggling my mind is that she has decided, because of course Atwood decides she didn't have to write this book. She'll tell you a story, a real story, something that happened to her or something she experienced, say as a child. And she'll narrate the story and you'll see it in full technicolor.
And then she'll say, if this sounds like my novel, you know, X, Y, whatever, or if this sounds like X story in Dancing Girls, that's because it is. Bam, the end. And for somebody who has, who has been in some ways maybe reticent to reveal the truth behind the fiction, I find it so fascinating that she has chosen to, you know, walk us through her life, her memories and Canadian history in this peculiar way.
And then to isolate, you know, poignant moments from her life that informed her writerly journey. I can't believe.
[Neil Pasricha]
It's called Book of Lives.
[Nita Prose]
Yes, I can't believe how generous it is. I can't believe it.
[Neil Pasricha]
That's really a thoughtful observation of a book to call it generous.
[Nita Prose]
Well, she didn't have to do that. She didn't, but she did.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah.
[Nita Prose]
She did it.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, she's a luminary for sure. And maybe the most famous living Canadian writer, perhaps.
[Nita Prose]
I would think so, yeah.
[Neil Pasricha]
I was gonna ask what the last book is that has interrupted your life, but it sounds like it might be this Margaret Atwood when you say, it's all I want to do.
[Nita Prose]
All that, it's all I want to do. It is interrupted.
[Neil Pasricha]
I love that. That's amazing. I haven't felt that in a while about a book.
Although right now I'm 200 pages away from finishing Dune for the first time and it's becoming quite gripping.
[Nita Prose]
Yes.
[Neil Pasricha]
Do you have a white whale book or any book that you've been chasing the longest in any way? Like trying to- To either read that you haven't read or a thing that's like a classic that you've always said you were gonna get to or anything like that?
[Nita Prose]
Any sort of- I have tried over and over again to read Moby Dick and understand why that's a classic and who would want to read it. And I cannot understand it and I cannot complete it. I think I've tried three times over the course of my life.
I keep waiting to graduate into a period of my life where suddenly I'm like, aha, now I get it. It hasn't happened yet. I don't get it.
[Neil Pasricha]
That's okay. Yeah, you don't have to, but I appreciate the effort and I know what you mean because I also have started that book and not finished it. And I asked David Sedaris this question.
He said, well, any book that I find challenging that I kind of want to read or feel like I should, I just audio book it. Like I just put it on audio and he picks up garbage for nine hours a day. Everybody kind of famously knows this.
So he'll just be like, I'll spend two days and I'll just kind of grind it. I'll kind of grind through that book. I can't, I don't think of reading that way.
[Nita Prose]
No, I don't grind through books, like especially in publishing, my goodness. You have so little time. You don't grind through manuscripts.
Like if it doesn't capture your attention, you're done.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, that's as simple as that. I was actually gonna ask you that was one of the questions I had written down. So as an editor, what are your, what are you looking for when you get a new, like what would be your advice to a first time writer trying to get the attention of an editor at a publishing house?
Everybody knows you have to kind of write a query letter. You sort of send your book around to every literary agent or editor that you can. You find those names by looking at the acknowledgements of books that you feel sort of similar to or connected with.
You might use a website like Agent Query to find out which agent represents certain writers. You send these letters, you mail out, let's say like 10 or 20 or 30, let's say five or 10 or 15 of those editors will see those sample pages in your letter. And I've just heard you say, you're just looking for something that gets your attention.
Is that right? What else are you looking for when you grab a new script?
[Nita Prose]
I want voice. I want a sense of voice. I want to know that there's an audience.
So sometimes you can have voice, but you think, well, it has an audience of five. Well, that's not gonna work in the publishing sphere. So those are the things that I look for.
The good news is a lot of the other things really don't matter. Who you are, what school you went to, all of that stuff doesn't matter because what matters is when I enter your story, do I want to stay there? Do I want to know more?
Is there something original about your work that stands out? Those things always matter to me more than anything else.
[Neil Pasricha]
Wow. That's an amazing place to I think maybe finish. What matters is when I enter your story, do I want to stay there?
On behalf of me, millions of people, you've guided a lot of beautiful books through gestation out into the world, including two of mine. You Are Awesome, that book on resilience, that was a unique kind of format, I think for both of us, a self-help book with a memoir kind of twisted together. And then Our Book of Awesome, that started like 10 years later, kind of how do you do an encore of a big book?
She's a shepherded girl on a train. You've kind of, Ian Reid's books, you've taken all these books, you've read widely, you've edited widely, you've kind of gone through the trenches. And then now, millions of people have followed along the stories of Molly the Maid, and you are like, you're young, you're like, you're just, and you're writing a book a year.
I mean, this is really a generous gift that you've given. You've created stories that people want to stay in. Nita, you really have, and it's special.
It's amazing what you've done. You've contributed a great body of work to the world of, to the Republic of Letters, as David Mitchell has called it. And when I said good phrase, he said, it's not mine, it's not mine.
So I don't know who that came up with that one. But thank you so much for what you've done, what you've created. Our audience here is your people.
Like it's editors, it's booksellers, it's librarians. That's who's listening to this show. To get an hour and a half into a conversation with an author about writing styles and stuff, you know, we're book people, and we are smaller than we used to be.
And 58% of people read no books last year. And yet those that do love it and recognize that this is special and necessary work that is so vital for all of us. So I applaud you for what you've done and what you're doing.
[Nita Prose]
Thank you, Neil. That's very kind.
[Neil Pasricha]
Do you have any final words of wisdom, bits of advice for those that are aspiring to write a book, for those that are working on a book, to those that are out there listening to this, any final hard-fought piece of wisdom that you would leave our listeners with as we close off the conversation?
[Nita Prose]
Well, I think some people find that my advice is annoying, so I keep giving it. This is the only piece of advice that when I've asked, I will give freely. And if you want to be a writer, you need to read.
Now, what do I mean by that? What I mean is don't only read for pleasure, don't only read what you like, but read to dissect, read to understand how a story works, how narrative functions, how characters are built and made, how time is used. Read for everything you can read for, for devices and theme and tone and mood and everything else that you can learn from the writers you like and the writers you don't, that you could transport to your own worlds and narrative abilities.
That is what I mean by read. And I would distrust any writer who doesn't read in that way. It's wonderful to read for entertainment, yes, but it's also important to read as a writer.
[Neil Pasricha]
Beautiful advice and words that I'm still trying to inhabit and process and do in my own life as I always find writing and reading things that I'm always trying to get better at. Neita Prose, thank you for this great conversation. It's flown by, I really appreciate it.
And I thank you so much for coming on, Freebooks.
[Nita Prose]
Thank you so much, it was such a pleasure.
[Neil Pasricha]
Hey everybody, it's just me, just Neil again, and hanging out in my basement with my wires in my studio. Listen back to the wise and wonderful Nita Prose talking about which books most shaped her life. How many quotes jumped out to you in this thing?
A lot of quotes jumped out to me. I'll read you a few of them now. Nita gave us this one, this kernel, this gem.
Publishing is always, always, always a wild ride. So you gotta buckle up. The lows are lows, the highs are highs, as so many of my friends in the business say.
And I think that's very true, but I wouldn't have it any other way. You know, right now in my career or my writing life, I really do experience this. Like at the beginning, the highs were high.
I, you know, I got five publishers bidding on my first book. I didn't have to try to sell it. Everybody was coming to me because my blog was popular.
And now I'm at this age in my career, perhaps AI driven, perhaps industry driven, but just, or perhaps me driven, where it's harder to get a book published. I have to like make more pitches. I have to like talk to my publisher.
They change around, there's new editors, there's new publishers there. So what she's saying about ups and downs is true. Susan Cain, a friend of mine, also a past guest on the show, she always says, publishing's not for the faint of heart.
Same idea. So if you're in this industry or you're trying to get into it, just remember that. There's a big, big kind of vertiginous swings along the way.
I like what she told us about the way to get in. The way into publishing is like any old school career. An apprenticeship, you have to like watch and be mindful and get in, probably for a job that like doesn't pay very much money or pays a very, very low amount of money, as Nita was kind of saying, but you get to listen and learn and try to help make the lives easier of somebody above you, which is kind of a great leadership skill.
The proximity to books is the biggest gift and you make the sacrifice of monetary gain for that. It's unfortunate, it's true, and she said like, we don't wanna do the soulless work of like being a banker or a lawyer or whatever. I know that's a bit reductive probably, but if you get a chance to work in something that you love, what's that worth, right?
Like that's what she's kind of saying. She's like, what's that worth to you? Because that's probably worth to you more than your paycheck.
Hopefully it is because nobody really gets paid that much in publishing. Not many people buy books. Seth Godin way back in chapter three kind of laid out the numbers for us, right?
But the number of books published per year, the number of books people read, you do the math and it's like, everyone's getting 50 cents along the way, but that's okay. We're lucky we have this industry. We're lucky that we have an ability to publish, write and read great works of art.
I was just in a used bookstore, four stories tall right here in downtown Toronto. There's a lot of great ones. I like the fact that like language and wisdom and stories are exchanging hands that way.
And is anybody making a ton of money along the way? No, I mean, maybe Audible. I mean, I can't think of who else would be, but for the most of us, it's just the gift is baked into the work itself.
We get the gift of learning. We get the gift of scratching our curiosity. We get the gift of sharing stories.
When I picture myself like super old and like, maybe I'm like brittle and I can't get up and out of the chair very easily. I picture myself reading, like there's the gift. It's in my hands.
It's annexing all worlds up to today. I think that's worth a lot. And that's what Nina's kind of telling us.
Also on writing and writing craft, she says sometimes through the metaphor of story, there can be greater truth than in fact, amen. She says, there's a part of me that becomes very plastic and malleable, very fragile and flexible in that creative state. And I wanna be the only person manipulating in that state.
I thought that was a really good kind of metaphor for flow. And then she talked about writing rules. She says, rule number one for my world is, this world I create is emotional truth.
Rule number two is, what can I get away with believably where the reader can step into my experience and complete the picture? Because we kind of talked about how, in Lord of the Flies, you don't know where the kids are from. You don't know where they are.
That's fine. Similarly in The Maid, and that's fine too. Paulo Coelho, I think he wrote The Alchemist, is famous for saying, what you leave out is as important as what you leave in.
Three more books to add to our top 1000 from the wise and wonderful Nina Prose, including number 536, Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Number 535, The Life of Pi with Yann Martel. Spoiler alert, also very close to landing an interview with Yann Martel.
So hopefully that happens and we hear from him on this show later this year. And number 534, Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, D-L-I-A Owens. Thank you so much to Nina for coming on the show.
And thank you to all of you for listening. Are you still here? Did you make it past the three second pause?
If so, welcome back to the end of the podcast club. This is one of three clubs that we have for three books listeners, including of course the Cover to Cover Club, people that attempt to listen to every single chapter of the show. By the way, if you do, drop us a line so we can add, we're starting to keep a list of people that do this.
For many years we didn't, so I miss like most of you who are in this. But if you did, drop me a line, it's at threebooks.co. You can email me. And of course there's The Secret Club.
I can't say more about it, but you can listen for clues. How do you get clues? Well, the first thing you do is you call our phone number, 1-833-READALOT.
That's the clue, 1-833-READALOT. And from there you get a secret password and you'll know what to do once you listen. With that, let's start off as we always do by going to the phones.
[Nita Prose]
Hi, this is John Titus from Boys Town, Nebraska.
[Neil Pasricha]
I wanted to make sure, if someone hasn't already mentioned it, I'm new to your podcast. I am so excited to share my formative book, which is The Fall of Freddie the Leaf by Leo Buscaglia, PhD. If you need to be moved, read this classic children's book.
It is the beauty of life.
[Nita Prose]
And I can't wait to hear if you've read this. Thanks, take care.
[Neil Pasricha]
Thank you so much to John from Nebraska. John, welcome to the club. Thanks for being here.
Thanks for listening to Three Books. As always, by the way, if I play your voicemail or read your letter, you get a free book. So just email me and tell me which of my books you'd like.
I'll sign it, I'll mail it out to you just to say thanks for listening. If you're worried about calling in, don't be. Just do what John did, just leave a 30-second note and say, hey, here's one of my formative books because then we get to talk about it.
Have I read The Fall of Freddie the Leaf, L-E-A-F? A Story of Life for All Ages by Leo Buscaglia, B-U-S-C-A-G-L-I-A. I have not, however, I will soon because I just ordered it.
I just ordered it. Appropriate for all ages, featuring beautiful nature photographs throughout this poignant, thought-provoking story follows Freddie and his companions as their leaves change with the passing seasons and the coming of winter, finally falling to the ground with winter's snow. This book is super popular.
I got really high ratings online. I've just ordered a copy of it, so I'll get it soon. And it's my perfect length, 28 pages.
You know me well. Thank you, John from Nebraska. Also, side note, love Nebraska.
I've been there a couple times, both times to Omaha. All right, and now it is time for the letter of the chapter. And this chapter's letter comes to us from, oh, I have it right here, Jordana B.
Jordana says, Neil, your podcast is what I'm grateful for today. After listening to your chapter with Johan Hari this morning, I'm overwhelmed with too many thoughts to write the coherent email I would like to. So for now, you are awesome, as is Johan.
I love to gasp, but what I've listened to so far, it's obvious that your appreciation, interest, and enthusiasm for their contributions to the world and for the books that shape them makes your podcast a gem. I've also listened to Gabor Mate and the two Daniels episodes. As you said to Johan, I feel richer having listened to such thought-provoking and informative conversations that are deep yet weaved with lightness.
My three formative books are The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger, Long Walk to Freedom, The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela, and Women Who Run with the Wolves, Myths and Stories of the Wild Women Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. The first two books were life-shaping and the third was life-changing. Thanks for being curious and for promoting books.
I read The Book of Awesome years ago, and I'm very excited for three books to be a fulfilling part of my desire for enrichment, positivity, and nourishment. Have a wonderful day from Jordana. Oh, Jordana, thank you so much for your note.
I love, by the way, two of those formative books, Catcher in the Rye and Women Who Run with the Wolves are on our list already, but not the Nelson Mandela one, which is great. Lisa Labute, who ran the store The Goods in Roncesvalles in Toronto, she gave us Women Who Run with the Wolves, which now that I've heard about it, I see it everywhere. It's one of those things that, you know, it's kind of in my head.
Jordana, drop me a line, give me your address, tell me which one of my books you'd like. I'd love to sign and send you a copy to thank you for your letter. All right, and now it is time for the word of the chapter.
Oh yeah, you know it, it's time for a word cloud, people. Here we go, over to Anita now.
[Nita Prose]
Find your way through that labyrinth, my Luddite ways. They run the gamut. The benefits of being there outweigh the traumatic boredom.
I love books that are allegorical. All the things that have infringed upon that were an impediment. I am not the solo creator on high who's delivering a fait accompli on the page.
It's a liminal time for me. It's essentialized. It really is a distillation of the best of her.
Quibbles, beautiful, ethereal, and it feels like an objet. In some ways, maybe reticent?
[Neil Pasricha]
Yes, indeed it is. Quibble, let's go with quibbles. Quibble, quibble, Q-I-B-B-L-E.
Did you know quibble likely originated in the early 17th century as the diminutive of a now obsolete noun? There's a noun that quibble is based on that doesn't exist anymore, and that is quib, Q-U-I-B, which means an evasion, strongly associated with the Latin word quibbus, in which, or for which, which is still found in legal jargon. But let's tell me more about quibble.
It's a pun, a play on words from the 1610s. Quib, we already talked about, but I wanna go over to Merriam-Webster, because Merriam-Webster, you know, I don't know. Do you trust the AI thing that comes up?
I think we gotta go to the source. Merriam-Webster says quibble means to evade the point of an argument by cavilling about words, to evade the point of an argument by cavilling about words. What does cavil mean, C-A-V-I-L?
Did you know what that word meant? To raise trivial and frivolous objection. The author cavilled about the design of the book's cover.
Huh, interesting. Cavil, we learned a word by finding a word. It is indeed quibble.
I don't wanna quibble about quibble too much, so we'll end it there. Thank you, everybody, for listening all the way to the very, very end. It's a pleasure to have Nita on the show.
Stay tuned for the next Full Moon, where we'll see you again on chapter 161. And until next time, remember that you are what you eat, and you are what you read. Keep turning the page, everybody, and I'll talk to you soon.
Take care.