Poured Over: Bobby Finger on The Old Place

By Miwa Messer / September 22, 2022 at 6:00 am

“Ever since we left, when I was 13, it’s a place that I think about constantly. I think about it in hypothetical terms. It’s something that I just sort of lose myself in all the time. I left before things really got complicated. I left when I was 13. What if I had stayed until now? And what if I had left and gone back? You know, the book kind of stemmed from this story that I had been working through in my mind, all of these hypothetical versions of myself. And then it turned into this.” Bobby Finger, writer and co-host of the celebrity and entertainment podcast Who? Weekly, breaks new ground in his debut novel, The Old Place. Inspired by his real-life roots in Texas, Finger explores the consequences of love and loss in this small-town narrative centered around a retired schoolteacher burdened by a decade-old secret. Bobby discusses his journey to writing a novel, his literary influences and creative process—and more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. And we end this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Marc and Becky.

Featured Books (Episode):
The Old Place by Bobby Finger
Where’d You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Featured Books (TBR Topoff):
Mrs. Fletcher by Tom Perotta
A Man Called Ove by Frederik Backman

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.

Full transcript for this episode:

I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and yes, you know Bobby Finger’s name from his podcast Who? Weekly. But also, you guys this novel, his debut, The Old Place is so charming and it has a big beating heart just like Where’d You Go Bernadette or one of Eleanor Brown’s novels and we’re so excited that Bobby’s here today to tell us all about The Old Place. Bobby, thank you so much for joining us. This is great!

Thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah, this is great so far. I mean, you’ve already said kind words, I’m thrilled. This is amazing.

Okay, so where did this novel come from?

This novel came from my childhood and my family and the town where I grew up until I was 13. It’s a small town, I geographically like the way I describe this town, the way that I describe the streets, the railroad tracks, the main street, the school, it’s from my memory of this town I grew up in, D’Hanis, Texas, which is so far removed from what the town is called in the novel which is Billington. I kind of deliberately didn’t want to name it anything remotely like D’Hanis. I didn’t want it to be German, I was just like, I want it to be separate, I want it to be distance, even though that’s what the town is.

But it’s a town that my family is from, the Finger side of my family. They’re from there. We have very deep roots in that town. And my family, my parents, decided to move. And ever since we left, when I was 13, it’s a place that I think about constantly. I think about it in hypothetical terms. It’s something that I just sort of lose myself in all the time. I left before things really got complicated. You know, I left when I was 13. What if I had stayed until now? And what if I had left and gone back? You know, the book kind of stemmed from this story that I had been working through in my mind, all of these hypothetical versions of myself. And then it turned into this. So yeah, that’s where The Old Place came from.

Okay, what’s the population?

At the time it was under 1000, it was maybe 900. I think they’re maybe a head and shoulder above 1000 at this point, but it’s not getting any bigger. You know, it’s one of those small towns, that is just, it’s going to stay that way. And then I think it’s slowly just going to atrophy and then kind of no longer exist. It’s sad, but it still exists. And there’s like the final remnants of the families that I knew then are still there, like the old people that I knew there are either dead, or they’re getting quite old so it just feels like, I don’t know, my connections to that place are slowly dwindling. Oh, I haven’t been back. My parents go back pretty frequently, but kind of because they live in San Antonio, which is 90 minutes away. And that’s a part of the book, its proximity to the big city. Because San Antonio is a big city.

It is.

And it’s so close. It’s just far enough away to feel impossible for a lot of people in this novel, and I think for a lot of people there, including myself. I don’t go back often. I haven’t been in five years. My parents, I think there’s a reason for my parents to go a couple times a year, because they keep in touch. And also, they’re just closer. And a lot of it has to do with you know, funerals, weddings, those sorts of things, like a new birth.

I come from New England and I think there’s a part of that place that, I mean, I haven’t lived there in a million years. And I think there’s a part of that place that I carry around because their behaviors and you know, idioms and there’s just stuff you carry around even if you’re not going back regularly. And Mary Alice, okay, there are four women we’re going to talk about first. There’s Mary Alice, her sister, Katherine, Mary Alice’s neighbor, Ellie, and then there’s a newcomer to town called Josie and Josie is a transplant from Brooklyn.

Yes, she is. Yes, she is. I love all of them. I love Josie.

They’re fabulous these women. But I will say too, I think lots of us have Mary Alices in our histories or our presents. Regardless of where you are. You could be in Illinois, and you have a Mary Alice because she’s this woman who’s been teaching math for a very long time. She’s a widow now and she has a son. And we’re going to learn a little bit about Michael, but we’re also going to stay away from spoilers in this conversation because it’s way more fun to do that and it’s way more fun to discover these folks. But Mary Alice, size 11 shoe, she’s not little.

No, she’s not little.

She is the heart in a lot of ways of this book. And even though she’s prickly, and even though she’s a little intimidating…

And mean.

Yeah. She’s got some moments. But Mary Alice, when did she show up for you? How did she come? Like, who is this woman? She’s so great.

I have to pretend like I’m having a conversation with my mother really quickly. I’m like, she’s not you. She’s not. This isn’t how I perceive you. And yeah, that was a worry. Because I think the very fact that I set it in this town where I’m from made my parents nervous, which they told me. It made me nervous because I didn’t want anyone in that town, I didn’t want anyone in the family, to think that I was basing it on them. Because I was not. But Mary Alice came from, I mean, I’ve been thinking about the story for so long. I wrote it as a screenplay first years and years ago, and then it sort of morphed into this. You know, put it in a drawer. Because that’s what I wrote. That’s what I went to college to do. I never went to a literary workshop and thought I would pursue novel writing. I wanted to be a screenwriter, that didn’t work. I was like, well, I’ll be a copywriter, I can get a job doing that. I don’t want to have to move to Los Angeles.

But when I was thinking about this story, I wanted to tell a story about my town because like you said, it’s this thing that I carry with me all the time. It’s a place for a long time I was ashamed of. You know, I didn’t like telling people I was from a small town for so long. And over time, I came to accept it. I came to see it as this part of myself that was just the truth and a fact of my life and a fact of my history that is worth sharing. And so slowly over, you know, 20 plus years away from that place, I came to a moment in my life where I was even more comfortable, really considering it and sharing it. And something that as I said, like, I’m constantly thinking about it. And a hypothetical that was running through my head is, I think there’s a lot of gay literature and gay art, gay movies, where the queer character leaves and escapes. And you see the entire story from the perspective of the person who left, and you know their fabulous life or their not so fabulous life, in this new place. And their past is a memory for usually really understandable reasons. It’s trauma that they’re leaving, or it’s this feeling of isolation that they want to leave and they want to break free. And I love that. I love those stories.

But I found myself wondering, what about the people you leave behind? You know, like, what if you’re leaving behind something that isn’t so objectively terrible that it’s not worth exploring? What if the people in your life weren’t villains, they were just kind of bad? You know, they made some bad choices. They made some mistakes. And their parenting, or their way of being your friend. And I just thought that perspective really spoke to me. And they were the people that I found myself thinking about most. Like, what did I leave behind? I left so young, that it’s all memories. You know, like, I don’t think I have a firm grasp on who these people were because I was so young, but they’re still incredibly robust in my head.

As I mentioned at the top of the show, there’s so much heart in this novel. And you know, there’s some messiness too because life is messy.

Yeah.

Mary Alice and her sister who shows up in the middle of the night and Katherine, sort of kicks the can over. Mary Alice is no longer working as a teacher. She’s sticking her nose into things and making people feel slightly unwelcome. Poor Josie, we’ll come back to Josie in a second. But Katherine and Mary Alice have grown up in this town. When did Katherine show up? When did you know you were writing about sisters? I mean, it seems like they probably showed up at the same time, honestly.

They showed up at the same time. And again, I want to avoid spoilers, too. But they showed up at the same time because I wanted that parallel of the sister who left. I wanted someone who left and someone who stayed. I wanted every possible option for living in that town. And there are myriad options, right? Like there are more options than I could even put in this book. But those were the most pronounced ones. And they came at the same time.

I will say I had a hard time naming Katherine. I didn’t know what to call her for a very long time. And Mary Alice was so obvious. Mary, Alice was obvious. Ellie was obvious. Michael was obvious. Like all of these names just made so much sense. But Katherine is kind of tricky. Because it takes a while to understand what her relationship with Mary Alice was and to learn the fact that they at one point had a wonderful relationship. And you’re kind of wondering for a long time, well, what ruined it? Why did she leave without contacting her? And so I knew I needed her to make Mary Alice makes sense, also. So, they came at the same time.

I had a moment where I thought Katherine was actually the bigger sister, the older sister, and then I realized, oh, no, wait a minute. This is the baby sister taking the reins because the older sister has made a mistake. Katherine leaves and comes back. Ellie, even though now she has been in this town for more than a decade, she’s still a newcomer. This is the kind of community you’re writing about where it’s like you could live here for a couple of decades, and you’re still not from here.

You’re still not from here. And she still doesn’t have many friends in town, a lot of that is a factor of her job. But she works out of town. And I love that dynamic. I always thought that was so interesting that both of my parents worked in town, and they were both teachers growing up. And they were they were people who drove a long way. I love how much driving is in this book, because I just don’t do that here. But there’s so much driving in Texas. And those are just like sort of these little nebulous memories I have of growing up just being in the truck, a lot. Not having any idea where you’re going, but just knowing that, oh, we’re going to this person’s house, or we’re going to run this particular errand. And this is a woman who gets up, she drives to another town to go to work. That’s where all of her coworkers are and she comes home. And that’s how it’s been for 10 years, she still feels disconnected. But she’s happy, you know, in her way.

Every morning, she starts her day by walking over to the neighbor’s and having coffee with Mary Alice. And, you know, it’s clear that they’ve been friends for a really long time but also, they do have some moments where you’re like, huh, do you actually like each other?

It’s true, but I thought that was so much fun to write. Because I think that’s so true of the best friends you have. I think it’s something that comes up a lot with friendship, or it’s like, we can go so long without seeing each other, and then you come back and everything is fine. But this is a version of that, where you kind of have the same dynamic, but they live right next to each other, you know, like, they still feel quite distant, but they’ve started to see each other more often, ever since she retired. So I liked writing this friendship because it was this deliberate act of Mary Alice, where she said, ‘I need I need to start this back up again.’ You know, like, I want to put in the work to make this friendship happen. And as I’ve gotten older, I realized that maintaining friendships require work, they require effort, and it’s effort that Mary Alice didn’t want to put in for a very long time. She had her reasons, obviously. But I just love the idea of different ways friendships can be maintained over time.

It’s very easy for her to sort of say I’m in my own little bubble, I am doing my own little world. Oh, the church picnic. Mary Alice and the church picnic. I will tell you, you terrified me a little bit with the instructions for the potato salad, because I was like, if that were me, I would go to the grocery and I would buy potato. And I can actually cook, but those instructions are just so terrifying, and so precise, and they’re so very Mary Alice where it’s like, we know this works. Just do it this way.

And they’re so simple. Like it’s not a potato salad recipe if someone asked me for a potato salad recommendation. Like, I wouldn’t give that classic simple southern potatoes. As much as I love it. You know, but it’s like there’s something about, it’s like an insidious simplicity. It’s just like, no, we’re doing it this way. It’s mayonnaise. It’s onion. It’s potato. That’s it. And you’re making these rules just as a way of maintaining power, like grasping onto whatever power that you can somehow maintain. I mean, I’m speaking Mary Alice’s voice, but yeah, I love how simple it is and how complex it is. At the same time, you know, this demanding thing.

Which brings me to Josie. Because Mary Alice is no longer teaching the math class that Josie is now teaching.

Right.

And I have to tell you, if I were Josie and suddenly this woman with her size 11 foot came swanning into my classroom, and it’s the first day of school and these kids don’t know you– and anyone who has been around teenagers long enough knows that you can’t let them see your belly. Terrible way to describe it. But you know, teenagers know what’s up. They’re really smart. And I don’t think they always get enough credit for being really smart, but they know when something’s not right. And I’m sorry, if the old teacher came swanning into the room and said, ‘I just want to see how you’re doing this.’ My eyes would get really big.

And I think Josie and Mary Alice are both aware of that. You know, like Josie knows that she is setting the tone for the entire year. Mary Alice knows that what Josie did is going to set the tone for the entire year. And they can’t articulate that in front of each other. They almost don’t know if the other knows that they know, but they’re both smart women. They’ve both done this before. They know how the teenagers are thinking, and well Josie is horrified. She’s like this is done. This is ruined.

But at the same time Josie is really excited to be in this tiny, tiny town in Texas that her husband is from. I think she might be more excited to be there than he is, and he’s not happy to be back. But she’s really excited to be there.

He’s back down to a normal resting heartbeat. He’s just back in his comfort level. And she’s like this almost like vacation, but she has to keep convincing herself that it’s not vacation. She’s like, no, this is where we live now. And I’m doing it to stick it to all of those people in New York that I’m sick of. After I moved to New York, it was hard to imagine people were from here, you know what I mean? I love meeting people who are from Manhattan. I love finding out how they grew up, how they walked to school, they took the subway, like everything about it is so fascinating to me. And it wasn’t until I met a lot of them, that some of them started moving away. And to me, I’m like, why would you ever leave this place? But it happens. And I’m realizing, oh, it’s the same impulse, that people are a variation of the impulse that people in other places have when they want to move to New York. To them, it’s old hat. She thinks it’s really exciting. And no one else that she’s friends with can understand why that’s exciting. And sort of like, how dare you not understand why that’s exciting to me?

You’ve got this tiny town. You’ve got these women. Some have husbands, some do not. Some have larger families, some do not. But when did you sort of figure out that the screenplay needed to evolve into a novel, let’s talk about the mechanics for a second because you’re taking something that’s what 75 pages max? 60 pages, something like that?

It was about 120. But those are, you know, those are sparse pages. It’s dialogue heavy. And that was a problem I had an in screenwriting classes. And also, just if I would write. When I moved to New York, I worked in advertising. And so I was working as a copywriter, I was writing ads for years until I got a job working at Jezebel as a staff writer, like doing more journalistic writing and I loved it. But once I graduated from college, and I got this job, I was very settled in that life. I was like, that’s what I’m going to do. If I really want to be a screenwriter, if I really wanted to, I’d move to LA and I would try. I don’t feel like doing that. And I can just do this on the side. I was perfectly happy just writing a lot of screenplays and putting them in drawers or not even printing them. Leaving them as PDFs, putting them in a folder, losing that hard drive. I was very content not doing anything with them. I just liked having that outlet.

And that’s kind of how the podcast started too. It was just nice to do something superficial and fun and more creative than my day job. I was happy compartmentalizing all of that. But to get to the answer to your question, I had written it and I was happy with it. And I did not think that I would ever do anything with it. And a friend of mine, who’s a writer asked if she could read it, and no one ever wanted to read it. And I would never ask anyone to read it because it’s not for anyone else. And I said sure. I was very nervous because I didn’t ever send things to people. This was maybe in 2016. And she read it and I was I was really nervous about what she would say. Because I wasn’t used to that kind of workshopping or criticism. And all she said was, I read it, this should be a novel. That was it. That was the totality of all of her comments. And I was sort of irritated because I was like, well, I don’t write novels. I don’t do that. I was so thankful that she read it, amazing. Can you believe it? That’s a lot of time. But I was like, well, okay, I’m not going to do that. That’s not what I do. I never was formally trained in doing this. And then the process of turning it into a novel happened during the pandemic, when I just, I needed something to do entirely alone. And that was completely separate from everything else.

You have written a novel about love and loss and consequence. And, you know, it’s not necessarily an easy thing to do without sounding like you’re wagging your finger and saying, now all of you people read your cultural vegetables. I mean, it’s a terrible mixed metaphor. But like, there are times where you can pick up a book and feel like someone’s sort of shaking their finger at you saying that pay attention. And these women just are who they are. They just kind of flow across the page. And sometimes you look at them and say, that would be great. I would totally sit down and hang out with you. And then there are other times where you’re just like, oh, no.

Get me out of here!

Yeah, no. Thank you go away! The way the story moves, and the way it flows is just, it’s so organic and lovely and they just kind of do their thing and we have these moments where we’re like, oh, I just want to sit for a second. So, are you a linear writer?

Yes. Anytime I had the impulse to pick up my outline and say I really want to write the scene, I had to stop myself. This is my first novel, so that may change. But I was anxious about what it might do to the rest of the story if I skipped ahead. And maybe I’m capable of doing that, but I felt like I would more effectively let that story grow if I didn’t skip ahead. And especially, I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that it existed in this other form first. I really wanted to start fresh. And if I skipped ahead, I would have been relying on those bones that were already there. I didn’t want to do that. And I think that’s how I’ll continue to do it, because I found it pretty effective.

So I mentioned your podcast, at the top of this channel. And I have to say, I’ve been listening, I listen to other people’s stuff as I’m prepping for interviews. This is not the novel I would have expected from you. It seems like a left brain, right brain kind of thing, I suppose. It seems there’s this piece of you that wants the pop culture. And here’s the piece of you that’s sitting down with this really sort of sweet story. So, let’s talk about the show for a second.

This was writing for pleasure. Initially, it was a manuscript that eventually sold and turned into a novel, incredible. I couldn’t, not even my wildest dreams, could I have imagined that would happen. But it was writing for pleasure. And it wasn’t going to be pleasurable if it was just the same stuff I was doing all day. And I have the stupidest most wonderful job in the world and I love every minute of it. But I like separating those things. I like having time for me. And if it’s time for me, I’d rather it not bleed into the time I have for work. And so, I think that separating it made each thing stronger. Or, not stronger, it made it so neither one would get like diluted, I guess.

But the podcast is something I’ve been doing for a while with my friend, Lindsey Webber, and it’s about D list celebrities. I guess that’s the way the best way to describe them. They’re thems and they’re whos, we separated celebrity into a binary. Thems are the celebrities who you say ‘Oh, them’ and the whos are the people you say, ‘Oh, who’s that?’ Goes on the cover of this magazine, ‘Who’s on the front page of People?’ And it’s just really silly. And it’s about tabloid press. It’s about the silly antics that celebrities get into. We don’t really love covering celebrity death or major celebrity scandals because they’re plenty of other podcasts and news sources that do that. We’d like to keep it as silly as possible and as light as possible.

Are you prepared for Book Twitter?

No! I used to tweet all the time. And then early in the pandemic, Instagram and Twitter became this…and I know that everyone was doing it for their own reasons, but Twitter and Instagram started making me feel absolutely wild. I was like, why is everyone acting like things are fine and normal? I was on Instagram and I’d see people with their family, and that would make me sad, because I had no way of safely traveling across the country and seeing my family for so long. And it made me so sad to see the other ways people were coping with things and that their ways were successful in ways that mine couldn’t be. And I was just getting really upset. I stepped away from social media. And now I have to kind of get back into it a little bit like dip my toes into it. It’s not that I’m not ready for Book Twitter, I’m not ready for Twitter again. But it’s fine. I could do it before, I can get back into it. It’s going to be okay. It’s like returning to, not quite a small town, but like returning to a city that I thought I left.

Well part of why I raised social media is it’s changed the way we live. And that predates the pandemic, honestly. I remember when magazine covers were a much bigger deal than they are now. And magazines were, you know, four inches thick, at certain points in the year because the advertising was just so out of control. And now it’s kind of like that ecosystem has just changed. Whether it’s for the better or not, that is not my place to say, but it’s kind of fascinating to me that you can use social and go straight to the source.

I like it in Who? Weekly terms because the celebrities are on it. And kind of speaking to no one and everyone at the same time. It’s sort of like do you know how big your audience is? Like why aren’t you thinking about the way that you’re using this? So, I like the feed that we have curated on Who? Weekly’s Twitter account because it is totally absurd, totally unserious, it’s this world of celebrity that kind of has no overlap with my own reality. And it’s fun. When it becomes a reflection of my own reality, it’s like, no, I can deal with this elsewhere. I don’t want to see what this person that I used to work with, you know, 15 years ago is doing like, I have no interest in that.

And it is, it’s silly. I mean, there were some names I recognized and some names where first I had no idea where I’m going but okay, I’ll follow you guys because it’s fun to listen to you. And I’m also delighted to know neither of you pass the Psychopath Test, so that’s great!

If you would ask me about that in a week, I would have forgotten about it. The topics we talk about go in one ear and out the other in like two months.

But it is about connection. And writing books is about connection, and reading is an active connection, and social media does have its place as a connector– hopefully used for good more than disinformation– but let’s stick with the happy pieces of this.

I rely on social media to find books to read. Thank God for the Maris Kreizmanofs the world who are telling me what to buy. Without that, I’d be walking aimlessly everywhere.

She’s a good egg. I like her. I’m very fond of her. Those aren’t the only pieces that have formed you as a writer or reader. Obviously, movies are clearly part of your story as well. I mean, you don’t study screenwriting without wanting to be part of that particular thing. So, can we do a quickie sort of top five movies for you that serve who you are as an artist? Not just movies you like, because I have terrible taste in movies. I will own that I have terrible taste in movies. I love watching stuff blow up and Die Hard as a Christmas movie. But seriously, five movies that made you an artist.

There are movies that I watched all the time growing up. We didn’t have cable growing up but my family recorded a lot of things on television and had the VHS that were labeled very well by my dad. But they’re just movies that I watched over and over again as a kid and they’re things like, The First Wives Club is one of them. You’ll notice the pattern that a lot of them are about funny women, like first wife stuff. I love The Pelican Brief. The Pelican Brief I’m obsessed with. It’s the John Grisham book to movie that I love the most of all of them. I love Titanic. I love how many movies Titanic is in one. Other top fives, In Her Shoes, which is also based on a book, the kind of books that I like to read. I’m also about sisters. My Cousin Vinny was a big formative one for me, which I can kind of see, I’ve never thought about it until now, but I can see sort of how that could have led to something like The Old Place because there is something about the Brooklyn couple, making their way to Alabama, and dealing with this small town in a way that’s not condescending. It’s really funny, but ultimately, it’s their condescending attitude towards the small town in Alabama that gets them in trouble. And it isn’t until they kind of start falling in love with this place and treating these people with respect and as humans and as equals that they kind of crack the case. And I’ve never thought about that until just now. But I’m like, oh yeah, there’s some DNA in there that I clearly was drawn to. Is that five?

I think that is five. Close enough!

And talking about things blowing up, I love all of the Mission Impossible movies.

See.

Violent movies. Like I love Jackie Brown, that’s tons of murder in that movie, but that’s also based on a book. Those are some formative big movies for me.

Yeah, now I get it. I totally get it. But I want to talk about you as a reader too. And some of the folks who have influenced you from that front. You just talked about a couple of things that had been made into films from books. But you as a reader, who is Bobby Finger?

Books that I was reading so much… I had just finished the newest Anne Tyler novel before I started writing this. I discovered her late in life, like I discovered her maybe the year before I wrote, about a year and a half. I read all of them, just in a couple of months. I just read all of them. I’m so drawn, always been drawn, to that kind of like domestic fiction tone. I’ve read Ann Patchett before. I like those sorts of domestic dramas like Kent Haruf novels. I love those books that were in a small town. Brideshead Revisited is a big one.

Okay, okay. Wait a minute, Evelyn Waugh.

Yes.

Okay. We need to talk because I do, I love him. I love all of his stuff and I’ve always loved his stuff, including Brideshead. So, I’m having a moment where we’re talking about Brideshead in the context of a tiny Texas town.

And it has nothing to do with it in terms of setting. When I moved to New York, I was leaving this place. I was leaving Texas, and I was getting very emotional about it and very like in my feelings about it. And I was looking through one of my dad’s bookshelves, and I found this old copy of Brideshead Revisited. And I opened it up, and I’d never opened it up before, I’d never read it. I never read that in college, ever. And I said, oh, I should read it. I should probably read this, you know. And I asked my dad if I could take it with me and he said sure, that was your grandmother’s favorite book. She loved that you even picked it up. And I thought that was so interesting, that this old Texas lady that was her favorite book. I’ve lost two, I’ve cried about losing two things in my life, and one of them is this copy of this book that I lost in one of my New York moves. But it was filled with scribblings and notes. It was like maybe a 1960s or 70s copy of it. And she had all of these clippings in there. I guess they were about Evelyn, they were about the novel, I think maybe the like the 20th anniversary.

Again, I lost it, can’t revisit these things. But when I read it, I was like, my Catholic grandma liked this gay novel? And I know it’s not explicitly a gay novel. But the subtext is, there’s this like kind of queer romance at the center of this thing. Or at least close to the center of this thing. That was a that was sort of this motivating novel that made me start reading a lot more again, when I was in my early 20s. And to think that my grandmother, this small town, Texas woman, Catholic woman– I think a lot of her admiration for Evelyn had to do with his Catholicism and kind of him coming to the church late in life. I know that that definitely must have had something to do with her connection with him. But at the same time, if she really read a lot about him, she probably read about the fact that he was probably, you know, queer in real life, even though that’s something that he didn’t speak about. It was written about him. And I was just like we could have talked about this, like, what would my grandmother had said if I came to her at 25 and said I’m gay? I came to her later and said, I’m marrying a man. Until I had read that book and known that it was so special to her, I had a completely different perspective of her. It opened her up to me. And I think that had I not read that book when I read it, Mary Alice wouldn’t exist at all.

I get that. We find the right books when we’re supposed to find them. Yeah, but you know, the one thing I keep hearing through all of your work, whether it’s the novel or having loved movies or what have you, it’s story. It’s always about story. And you know, even as a copywriter, honestly, I mean, I’ve written scads and scads and scads of book copy, you’re looking for the story. And it’s not necessarily just summarizing the thing in the book. It’s like, what’s the story about the book that’s going to make someone say, oh, yeah, this is the one I’m buying right now. There are times where it’s really easy and then there are times where you’re just like, okay, here we go. It’s all story. It’s all story. It’s the best bits. It’s like the thing you wait to tell a friend at the end of the day, we’re not going to believe. And then you go from there.

Yeah. Yeah, totally. And I think that’s also something that the realization that it’s all story, is something that I came too late. Like, I couldn’t have written this book at any other point in time than when I wrote it. And I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that I was intimidated by the fact that I hadn’t. Like, all of these writers that I love and admire are brilliant and so eloquent and better. I mean, I love all kinds of books, I love books that you wouldn’t necessarily consider eloquently written, but when I think of authorship, it felt kind of unattainable to me. I was like, well, that’s not what I do. I don’t do that sort of prose writing, I don’t have that sort of training. I don’t have that sort of passion for it. It’s not something that I wanted to do ever since I was five years old, you know? And realizing that like, okay, what do I want to do here fundamentally? I want to tell this story. And I’m going to try to tell it. And I think realizing that kind of opened things up for me that I never thought could be opened, and maybe I didn’t even want them to just because like I said, I was very comfortable with the fact that I was what I was, and I did what I did. And that was fine. And I’ve slowly been going through this journey professionally where it’s like, no, I don’t, I don’t have to close those doors. It doesn’t have to be this binary of like, I do this or that. That’s it. And that’s a slow and tough lesson to learn.

More podcasts? I would love to do the podcast until I’m dead in the ground. You know, I love it. I feel so lucky to do that. I’ll do it for as long as the two of us are willing to do it. And I think that we’ll be willing to do it forever. And I’m working on something else. I’m working on book number two, and we’ll see how it goes.

Good. I’m very happy to hear that book number two is somewhere in the process.

Some words exist.

That’s good. That’s good. I’ve said this to other writers, but I’ll say it to you, too. We can be patient. We can actually be patient. We’ll get there when we get there.

Bobby, I know we’re bumping up on time. I’d rather just sit here and hang out with you and talk about this book until the cows come home. Pardon the pun. But I want to ask you one thing before we go. Because I know I’ve been dancing around a lot. And I’ve made it really clear that we’re dancing around a lot. But you know, Ellie has a son. And Mary Alice’s son, Michael, the two boys become friends. And there was a sweet moment between the two of them early on where I’m guessing that was one of your favorite scenes to write? Can you talk about that for a second before I let you go?

It’s a scene early on when they meet when Kenny moves to town with his mother, they move in next door. And I think it’s even something that surprises Mary Alice, that she’s eager to meet her. Because I think that’s another thing about small towns, I think there might be an assumption that like, oh, everyone is close. And everyone talks to each other. No. People are just as mean, people are just as closed off as they are in big cities. Obviously, there are shades of that, but like you could live next door to someone and not engage with them frequently. And so, Mary Alice surprises I think both herself and Michael by going to Ellie’s door and introducing herself and kind of initiating a friendship and saying, I’m going to start this.

And it just so happens that this boy is Kenny and he’s Michael age. And they instantly forge a friendship that is that sort of unspoken, adolescent recognition of difference, or a similarity and presentation, where it’s like, Michael could sense that Kenny was uncomfortable, Kenny could sense that Michael was uncomfortable, and are the two of them gay? Probably. But that’s not really even in their vernacular at this point. It’s just like, I see a little bit of myself in you, I think we could be friends. And in their first moment, as friends, they go to Mary Alice and Michael’s house and they play Nintendo. In any other space, if it had just been two boys who were very popular at school playing Nintendo, there would be no subtext there. It would be two boys playing Nintendo. But, because of their difference, there’s this warm connection there. And they don’t really know what’s happening. And I loved writing that scene. Because I don’t know that a lot of straight readers or a lot of readers would think about that. You are really considering how tough it is when you have this identity that feels so dissimilar to everyone else around you and you’re just trying to make a friend, like I needed that scene. Even though it wasn’t necessarily advancing any kind of plot, it was a piece of character that I would never cut out.

I think it all goes back to what you were saying at the top of the show, though, that you want to know what happens to the people in this community, and you’re not separating your characters from their community. And I think that’s really important. And I think it was a fun moment to read these nerd baby boys playing Mario Kart…

Just playing Mario Kart.

But also knowing the subtext. I know you’re not drawing a direct line from Brad’s head. But now that I know that Brian…

I would never draw a direct line.

I’m not saying you did. I’m not saying you did. But that’s part of the fun of being in and around books is connecting the dots. And it’s connecting the dots about who we are, whether you’re the creator, or you’re the person who’s reading the story, I think connecting the dots is always just kind of a treat.

And knowing that some people would be connecting the dots and the other people wouldn’t I think was very satisfying to me. Like, I know that queer readers might be connecting those dots instantly. Whereas, my mom or someone may have not put the pieces together until page 250. They may not have figured it out and that’s like the space that I live in, you know, so I found that really satisfying to write.

And it was really lovely to see that everyone gets their space. And everyone gets their truth. And everyone gets a moment. And I think I’m going to leave it there because we are dancing around so many other things– but you know what? You’ve got Mary Alice, you’ve got Katherine, you’ve got Ellie, and you’ve got Josie and the world just revolves around them and it’s kind of cool to see it.

It is cool to see, actually. Yeah.

Bobby Finger thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over. The Old Place is out now.

Thank you so much.