Poured Over: Chris Bohjalian on Telling Stories
“I decided to give myself the license to fail, and to write across gender, to write in the voice of a midwife’s daughter. And if the book isn’t working, fine, we’ll write it from the perspective of the midwife’s husband, from some other male character. But I loved it. It was so emancipating to not be me, to not be (at the time) this 30-something dude. And I loved it. And I think, my best books, my best characters, whether it’s first person or third person, are women.”
Bestselling author and all-around charmer Chris Bohjalian has written 23 books, including our May 2021 B&N Book Club pick Hour of the Witch, The Flight Attendant—now a hit HBO series—and his latest, The Lioness. Chris joins us on the show to talk about his love of bookstores, not writing the same story twice, researching and asking questions and learning stories, letting his characters guide the plot and going back to the first sentence, geography as a character, and so much more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. And we end this episode with a TBR Topoff with Marc and Becky riffing on their favorite Bohjalian novels.
Featured Books:
Water Witches by Chris Bohjalian
Midwives by Chris Bohjalian
The Red Lotus by Chris Bohjalian
The Sandcastle Girls by Chris Bohjalian
Hour of the Witch by Chris Bohjalian
The Lioness by Chris Bohjalian
The Flight Attendant by Chris Bohjalian
The Night Strangers by Chris Bohjalian
The Double Bind by Chris Bohjalian
The Light in the Ruins by Chris Bohjalian
Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian
Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart
Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult
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:
B&N: I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and I’m pretty sure Chris Bohjalian does not need an introduction. Twenty-three books in, and I was telling Chris before we started recording that I did a little fun, goofy thing because I had an Excel spreadsheet and I just sort of wanted to answer the question for myself. So 23 books with Knopf Doubleday. Average, you know, 331 pages per book, let’s call it 23 books. And you know, 300 pages is roughly what Chris 90,000 words, right?
Chris Bohjalian: So to give you 90 and 100,000. Yeah.
B&N: So, basic math, even if we go 90,000. That’s 2.3 million words, Chris.
CB: And, and 1.1 million additional words, in journalism, given that I was a columnist for nearly a quarter century.
B&N: Right. It’s a lot. It’s a lot. And you’ve always said you never wanted to write the same book twice. And you haven’t. The Lioness is out now. It’s very cool. It’s a 1964. It’s Safari, it’s Hollywood. We will get there in a second. But yeah, you really haven’t written the same book twice, ever, and 23 books in.
CB: Thanks. And also Miwa, thank you so much for having me on the show. And thank you so much for all you do, to make the world a better place. Celebrating what words and reading and books can mean to the soul. You have done so much for so many readers for so many writers, and speaking selfishly, for me as a reader, when I go into a Barnes and Noble and for me as a writer, thank you.
B&N: Well, it’s my pleasure. I mean, can you actually believe they pay me to do this, it’s really fun.
CB: They pay me to write.
B&N: Right? And I want to talk about the fun piece because you’re not always writing. I mean, you’re not a comedic writer. For the most part, let’s let’s go there. But you do have a really good time as you’re constructing these stories and discovering these characters and finding out where they take you because you’re kind of a pantser as you write, aren’t you I’m stealing a phrase from David Levithan, but you’re not sitting down with an outline to start these stories are you?
CB: No, I have no idea where my books are going. I depend on my characters to take me by the hand and lead me through the dark of the story. I begin with a vaguest premises. Functional alcoholic flight attendant wakes up next to a dead body far from home. Hollywood’s biggest star finally gets married and decides to bring her entourage into the Serengeti on a honeymoon, or Puritan woman is in an abusive, arrhythmic marriage and decides I’ve had enough. And that’s all I know, when I start.
B&N: We are gonna have a long conversation about the women. But you start with the idea, you start with the concept. When does the voice come in? I mean, is the voice part of that concept? are you just sitting down and writing until you know it? When you hear it?
CB: Usually, I have to know two things to start. The premise and the voice. Okay, it is this a very traditional third person omniscient novel. Is it a third person subjective novel? Or is it first person? Do I have the sort of idiosyncratic narrator? That I really get that I hear her or his or their voice in my head. Sometimes I do. With Midwives, I did. I knew instantly that this was a first person novel by a midwife starter and, and I knew the first sentence, and whenever I needed to find her voice, I go back to that first sentence.
B&N: We are gonna have a long conversation about the women. But you start with the idea, you start with the concept. When does the voice come in? I mean, is the voice part of that concept? Are you just sitting down and writing until you know it when you hear it?
CB: Usually, I have to know two things to start. The premise and the voice. Okay, it is this a very traditional third person omniscient novel. Is it a third person subjective novel? Or is it first person? Do I have the sort of idiosyncratic narrator that I really get that I hear her or his or their voice in my head. Sometimes I do. With Midwives, I did. I knew instantly that this was a first person novel by a midwife starter and, and I knew the first sentence, and whenever I needed to find her voice, I go back to that first sentence.
B&N: Okay, so 23 books, three of which we’re going to leave to the Sands of Time. Your 10,000 hours
CB: Deeply buried. I’ve written the single worst first novel ever published, bar none. I’ve written some really terrible books.
B&N: Okay. But here’s the thing as an ad guy making the transition you really were you were practicing your practice runs happened to get published.
CB: Unfortunately, for some readers, yes.
B&N: But here’s the thing. So, you know, let’s look at Water Witches in Vermont. That was sort of let’s use that as the starting point. And yes, I included those other three novels in the 2.3 million words because you still did write them.
CB: I did. Apprentice fiction, right.
B&N: Okay. But the reason I’m bringing up Water Witches and starting there is you really see the bones of a lot of your work. Not all of your work. But a lot of your work. There’s the family conflict. There’s the Vermont setting, which occasionally you’ve scooted out into New Hampshire and New York and whatnot, but Really Vermont is as much a character in a lot of your work as the people themselves so you’ve in the past talked about to have Vermont helped you find your voice as a writer. So let’s let’s get everyone situated in Vermont with you before we start wandering glow.
CB: There’s a great Ralph Ellison quote. “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.” So, Vermont is a character. Wherever my books are set. I hope the geography is a character right in The Lioness, the Serengeti, in Hollywood, are characters in The Red Lotus, Vietnam and New York City are characters, so Vermont, I grew up outside of New York City in every dysfunctional, John chi brisk suburb there is including Miami, Florida, which when I was a kid was a suburb of New York City. And then when my wife and I were really young, we moved to Vermont. And I discovered what it was like to be the dumbest human being in the village. I mean, I was the ultimate idiot transplant in Vermont. And we wouldn’t have gotten through our first winter were it not for the kindness of neighbors. So in a book like Water Witches, I found my voice for a couple of reasons. I found my voice because I understood that one of the things a writer is, is an observer. We’re really watching the world around us, and trying to share it with our readers. And as the dumbest person in the village of Lincoln, Vermont. Me.
B&N: Whether you’re writing historical fiction or contemporary stories, you do a ton of research. And it seems like it’s always like you pick up a thread, and you’re like, Hmm, is this personally interesting to me? So you really are this kind of wild generalist who’s just really looking for a story, right?
CB: Research is so much fun. One of the great gifts of being a novelist is asking people I don’t know, questions that are none of my business. And one of the things I found is that when you’re talking to someone about something they love, or what they do for a living, they are really forthcoming because they’re sharing their love. So when I was writing The Lioness, I was researching, fundamentally two things. The Serengeti and safaris, and old Hollywood. And that was really fun for me. I mean, I love getting to learn things that are weird. I had the best time talking to my two guides in the Serengeti, about all the ways there are to die. on a safari, and all of the things that tourists do that are stupid. I mean, a safari is perfectly safe if you listen to your guides, right? It’s not if you don’t, when I was writing The Flight Attendant, I had the best time talking to flight attendants. Every flight attendant can tell you a story that will leave you howling with laughter. Ranging from what do you really do with a dead body at 35,000 feet when you’re over the Atlantic Ocean, and there’s no place to put the corpse when I was researching the Red Lotus, every ER doctor, and ER doctors are amazing, would tell me stories that were really funny. And really, really interesting and surprising. I remember talking to one ER doctor in New York City about what it’s like on a weekend. I was really surprised when she said, Oh, man, weekends are crazy. You get so many people who tripped over their pets. You get so many people who have cut off a finger slicing a bagel.
B&N: I’m sorry, I didn’t realize that was the case. I assumed you know, there might be a few more car crashes or things like that. But oh, wow.
CB: They get that. And of course every ER doctor has on his her their phone, a photograph of an x ray of something that someone has inserted into a part of the body where it didn’t belong. I mean, I can’t tell you literally every ER doctor would say, Okay, I’m about to show you an x ray. And you’re to tell me what you are seeing in this image.
B&N: Have your guessed on the first try. Have you ever gotten it right?
CB: I never got it right.
B&N: Yeah, I can’t even imagine I really can’t but you also had a ghost story that started with a door in your own basement But took you so far as you’re being strapped underwater? So you could write about landing a plane on a river.
CB: The Night Strangers is a ghost story about the pilot who isn’t “Sully” Sullenberger, who has to ditch his plane in Lake Champlain and unlike solely, it pinwheels and sinks. And most of the passengers die. But he survives, and he’s haunted by his fallibility, the fact that he’s human, and he couldn’t do what “Sully” Sullenberger did. And I wanted to know what it’s like to be in a plane underwater and getting out so I remember that great movie An Officer and a Gentleman when Richard Gere goes into the dunk tank. And in An Officer and a Gentleman, that dunk tank is pretty simple. It’s an egg that you can crawl inside and it’s dumped into a swimming pool. Now the dunk tank is way cooler. Imagine a minivan suspended over a 100,000 gallon tank. And this minivan pod can be converted into 54 different fixed wing or rotary aircraft. And I did four dumps into the dunk tank one day, and the best one was the last one. Okay, so this point, you know, they trained me enough and because I want to be the pilot, they recreate the pod to be a seven DC Embraer. And they put me behind the yoke on the flight deck with a five point shoulder harness, and they drop me into the tank, turn it upside down. And I’m given 28 seconds to push away the yoke that out of the five point shoulder harness, open the door into the passenger cabin, open the door at the front of the passenger and swim to the surface. And I have two memories of this. When I escaped. The first was that was the most fun I’ve ever had. And secondly, I have now officially lost my mind. Yeah, who does this but but it was really helpful. Because there’s so many things I’d never thought about until I did it. How much my shoes weighed, how dark it is underwater, how everything is upside down. And you need to think upside down.
B&N: You do bounce sort of around and your narrators are who they need to be in first person, third person. But the women, the women, we need to talk about the women because you are very good at writing in women’s voices and people may notice that you’re a dude. So let’s talk for a second. You are a dude. So really though, you’re starting with the voice. You’re starting with the idea you have both of these pieces of the story. And then where do we go from there?
CB: When people talk about my women, narrators they often go right back to Midwives. And the first sentence that book is this. I used the word vulva as a child the way some kids said butt, or penis, or puke. It wasn’t a swear exactly. But I knew it had an edge where they could stop adults cold in their tracks. And I’ll never forget the moment that I heard that sentence in my head. I had this idea, the premise for a book about a midwife. And when I had the premise it was this daughter of a hippie midwife becomes an OBGYN and I thought it was gonna be gently comic novel about a mother who’s a hippie, and a daughter who’s a really buttoned up OBGYN. So now my daughter is about a year old. And I’ve interviewed at this point easily 15 or 20 midwives in OB GYN owns and nurse midwives. And I’m giving my daughter a bottle and it’s one of those moments at the end of the day when you know you’ve got 15/18 pounds in your arms that you love more madly than you ever thought you could love anyone or anything. And I remembered a story that a friend of mine had told me about her 4-year-old goddaughter, who had just come home from preschool entranced by the word vulva. She knew this was a perfectly fine word, but every time she said it, her mom and dad would sweat buckets. And so she was saying it all the time. And that sentence came into my head. So, as my daughter was asleep, I placed her in her crib. And it sounded to me like a midwife’s daughter. So I called up a midwife’s daughter that I knew. Her name is Erin Warnock. She’s the daughter of Carol Gibson Warnock who is a midwife who was just a gem, just a treasure and, you know, helped me so much writing the book Midwives. And I called up Aaron, who at the time, was at the University of Vermont. And I said to her, Erin, when you were a little girl, did you ever greater comfort level with the anti anatomic terrain than your peers. And without missing a beat, she said, Yeah, I was always the most popular kid in the sandbox. And so I decided to give myself the license to fail, and to write across gender, to write in the voice of a midwife’s daughter. And if the book isn’t working, fine, we’ll write it from the perspective of the midwife’s husband, from some other male character. But I loved it. It was so emancipating to not be me, to not be, you know, at the time, this 30-something dude. And I loved it. And I think, my best books, my best characters, whether it’s first person or third person, are women. You know, there’s this part of me that feels a lot like Dustin Hoffman and Tootsie at the end, you know, when he’s talking to Jessica Lane, and he saved her trying a reproach mom, that I’m, you know, I was a better man with you when I was a woman.
B&N: But you did also change tone while you were writing midwives. As you mentioned a second ago, you said, Well, I thought I was writing a comic sort of coming of age. And it really was not going to work that way. How often has that happened to you where you realized you’ve got a great thread, but oh, it’s going to zig when you thought it was going to zag.
CB: Almost every book. Okay, sometimes even better, sometimes for worse. Midwives took a hard left turn when my mom was diagnosed with cancer. And it was clear she was going to die. And my family does many things. Well, but but we suck when it comes to death. And and the book went into this really dark place. And when I continued to interview midwives, suddenly, I was asking them this question. Have you ever had a baby die? And most of them had because you know, babies die, people die. And then it got even darker. And I asked a midwife. Have you ever had a mom die? And almost none had. I would press the issue, I would say, but if you did, it’s a home birth. You’re not at a hospital? What would you do? And they thought I was pretty gruesome. They thought it was pretty dark. But then one midwife said to me, what could you do? I get the sharpest knife in the house. And I said and perform what a C section? She said, Yeah, we don’t carry scalpels, we’re midwives, not surgeons. And that line, I get the sharpest knife in the house, stayed with me. And that’s when the book took its ultimate zag. And I knew where it was going. And you know, The Lioness was really, really similar. In one way, in that it took a lot of changes and zigzag, but it was different in another way. However, when I began The Lioness, I began knowing it was going to be sort of this, the Poisonwood Bible meets And Then There Were None. Or, you know, after I’d read this book, later on, it was you know, it’s actually to quote Jordy’s book club. Evelyn Hugo meets Jurassic Park. I knew that I was going to create this ensemble where a lot of people were going to die. The question is, who? Where it zagged and changed was when I had this ensemble cast in the beginning. A lot of the people who I thought would live died, and some of the people I were sure were going to die, lived.
B&N: There were a couple of characters where I thought oh, you There’s no way there’s no way and then they show up at the end. It was delightful because I like being surprised that way, but I do.
CB: I do, too. I do too.
B&N: Katie and Carmen. They’re awesome. Those women, Katie and Carmen, they’re fabulous.
CB: Oh, I mean, my favorite characters in the book are by far, Carmen, Reggie, Terrance and Katie. And you know, there’s so many things that I wanted to do in the lioness, that when I started the book, I didn’t know were even going to be on my wish list. I mean, I knew I was going to be exploring old Hollywood. I was going to be a thriller. I knew it was going to be about wildlife. But I had no idea how much it would be about colonialism. I had no idea which is going to be about race relations.
B&N: But 1964. It wasn’t just America that was changing. There was a lot happening around the globe. Now you spent time on safari, doing your homework. But you were traveling, it was started the pandemic, right. We’re just as things were really starting to shut down. You are in the Serengeti. Do I have that right?
CB: Not precisely, no. What happened was this. I was in New York City in August of 2019. Because we were re workshopping the stage play of Midwives. And it went to a matinee. Okay. And I emerged into this cobalt sky. And I, you know, it’s hot, and I just been in an air conditioned theater. And I was I just been transported really far from New York City in this movie. And I thought to myself, Oh, my God, I love movies. Why have I never written a Hollywood novel? And so I decided, I would. And I’ve never written a book set in the 1960s or the 1970s, when I was a boy, and I’m from an era when so many people my age are a little older. The first movie that movie they ever saw was Mary Poppins, Julie Andrews, Dick Van Dyke dancing penguins, not me. First movie I ever saw with Bonnie and Clyde. My parents clearly had no filter, and we’re going to take me to whatever movie they wanted to see. So that’s my principal image and memory. The first movie I ever saw Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway being machine gunned in the Bonnie and Clyde death car. So I decided the book was going to be set in the 1960s. Because as you said so eloquently a moment ago, it’s an era of great cultural transformation. Everywhere. And when I was thinking about The Cold War, I thought about the proxy wars, right in East Africa. And wouldn’t it be interesting to take a bunch of Hollywood people, actors who pretend that’s what they do, they pretend, and producers and agents and publicists and put them absolutely out of their element on a safari, and I figured, yeah, we’ll go and 2020 Right, but then my wife and I got lucky. And there was a cancellation. And we were able to go in October of 2019. Okay, and thank goodness, we did because, I mean, you know, this book, quite literally saved my life in 2020.
B&N: How so? The writing of it, the researching of it?
CB: The writing of it, I mean, okay, you for those of you who are watching and listening. Some of you are saying, Oh, he just did a lie in his book tour. He’s got laryngitis? No, this is my new voice. Thank you. COVID. I got COVID in March of 2020. And this is my new voice. But in March of 2020, here’s what happened. I lost my voice completely. You know, we didn’t just cancel The Red Lotus book tour because the world shut down. I had a book published March 17, 2020.
B&N: I remember.
CB: Yeah. My wife is a fine artist. And her galleries are going out of business. Right? The biggest solo show she had scheduled in years was canceled. My daughter is young actor, and she has booked through all in 2020. And it all went away. Right away. All of us were learning to zoom. We were FaceTiming and talking on the phone. And I couldn’t even speak. And so all I did was walk my dog, hang out with my wife in this weird world where we’re writing notes to each other and wondering whether we’re both going to learn ASL for the first eight weeks. My daughter was with us. And I would do these weird virtual events and book clubs where I wouldn’t speak. And my daughter would be my voice because, you know, she knows my work. So well she’s narrated at least five or six of my audiobooks. And, I wrote this book. And it’s what I mean, I’m just gonna read you the dedication, because it really gives you a sense of what my headspace was, when the world is unraveling and, all of these ER doctors, I’ve interviewed for the Red Lotus and iron, emailing and texting from New York City, and Los Angeles, about the trauma that they are experiencing, and witnessing, and how helpless they feel. For my pod, literal and metaphoric from 2020, the year that Satan spawned in the first half of 2021, when I was hanging on by my fingernails, you gave me your hand, you are my Safari. I mean, I was really, really broken.
B&N: And books do save us. I mean, I am that person. I absolutely believe that there is a book for every reader and the folks out there who are saying, I don’t read, it’s not fun. I was spoiled for me in school. No, you just haven’t found the thing.
CB: I was so thrilled and so grateful. When I’m one of the 2021 Barnes and Noble book club picks was Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart, because A, the book is fantastic, isn’t it, though? I mean, it is so good. Gary is so smart. And he’s so funny. We need to be writing about the pandemic. I mean, and that was among the very first books to come out. And it was just, you know, so important. Jodi Picoult’s Wish You Were Here is really one of those books that I think is our legacy book. Because it really gets at, in some ways, the notion that A, the world is unraveling. B, we are all in quarantine. And C, we desperately need books when we can’t get out to help us get out. We don’t know about books make us empathetic, they make us better people. And my god Barnes and Noble and books, literally were the angels that help saved us in 2020 and 2021.
B&N: Well, there are a lot of bookstores that helped a lot of folks we can’t take credit. But what are your legacy books? I mean, obviously Midwives is in there, obviously. Well, we think The Double Bind is in there but Hour of the Witch, The Red Lotus, The Flight Attendant, The Lioness, I think we do need to add though The Sandcastle Girls that feels really important. I mean, that’s what I was gonna ask about the Armenian Genocide for a minute, once again, we’re back to not light, not fluffy, but a love story that’s really important and about a moment in world history that not everyone knows the way we might hope.
CB: I’m glad you added the sandcastle girls, that’s the one I would have added to that lightning. I’m a grandson of two survivors of the Armenian Genocide, the Ottoman Empire’s systematic annihilation of 1.5 million Armenians 300,000, the Syrians and countless Greeks under the cover of the First World War, and yet isn’t a genocide that until recently, was known. It’s known more now, because of the centennial of the start of the genocide in 2015. Because finally, the United States formally called it a genocide, right and recognized it as a genocide. But it’s still not well known. And when I wrote the book, and it was published in 2012, right, I wasn’t writing it for Armenians because we know the story. I mean, the fact is, three out of every four Armenians were executed, died, in the Armenian Genocide. There are 10 million Armenians in the world today. Most of us are descendants of the final 500,000 who are left alive in the Ottoman Empire. And I mean to this day, I don’t think a week goes by when I don’t hear from a book group saying, Would you join us or we just read The Sandcastle Girls? We are all educated readers. And we knew nothing about the Armenian Genocide until we read your novel.
B&N: And that’s part of the point I wanted to make. And we were talking about empathy just a second ago and yes, I mean, reading absolutely builds Your empathy muscle without a doubt. But you are covering a lot of ground in these books, you’re covering a lot of different emotional states. Despair is something that comes up frequently in your stories. I mean, and that’s the nature of fiction, right? I mean, you have to see people change. You’ve got to raise the stakes for them to really have to do what the story needs them to do in a way, right? I mean, you’re the one who’s driving the story.
CB: Yeah, that’s right. Isn’t when I was writing The Flight Attendant. I wasn’t writing in my mind. A page turner, right, or thriller. I thought I was writing a character study of two deeply damaged women. A flight attendant, who is a functional alcoholic, and an assassin, who is the daughter of a Russian oligarch and has so much blood on her hands, and is wondering if she has an inner to kill this flight attendant who has done nothing wrong except for pick up the wrong guy on the wrong flight and have one too many drinks in a hotel. Despair was part of who Cassie Bowden is, you know, Despair is who part of Miranda Orlov is. I mean, one of the things I love about The Flight Attendant TV series, is you get to see Kaley Cuoco is acting chops. You see? She’s a really, really good, dramatic actor. And to go back to that word despair. In season one and season two, because Kaley’s a really good actor. You feel Cassie’s despair, inner demons now. I mean, I hope my books aren’t a black hole of dread and despair where you never going to see the sunlight. But I’m certainly never going to draw the curtain on unhappiness. You know and midwives were talking about earlier there’s a reason that you see the bedroom cesarean that I don’t draw the curtain. In The Lioness, you see when the leopards when the hyenas when the lions when the snakes when the trees are going to kill you. thing that, you know the guides taught me is there are just a million ways to die in the Serengeti, right? I was never going to draw the curtain on any of it.
B&N: Story is the thing that connects us at whatever level it connects your characters that connects readers to you and your characters. Story is the thing that makes your work sing on the page. And I alluded to this early on, that there have been plenty of words that you’ve discarded plenty of pages, you’ve discarded plenty of projects you’ve discarded, but I want to talk about the process for creating these stories. Because sometimes you’re in, you know, 1950s, Italy, and you’re chasing a serial killer. And sometimes you’re in 1915, and the Armenian genocide. And you also did a world war two novel that’s set in Germany and Poland, as the Third Reich is falling, which not light material, but you never lose sight of your characters. You never lose sight of your story. But can we talk about the process for creating a world like that? Well, let’s let’s step out of the contemporary for a second, let’s really look at the serious historicals that you did.
CB: There are two kinds of historical fiction. At least, there is historical fiction that is close enough to the present, where you can interview people who were there. For a book like skeletons at the feast, I was able to interview Holocaust survivors and Prussians who were trying to stay ahead of the Soviet Army in 1945. I was able to talk to them about what they saw, what they experienced, what it was like. Then there’s the kind of historical fiction like Hour of the Witch would you said in 1662. If I’m talking to people who are there, I’m dead and something has gone horribly wrong. So instead, it’s all secondary sources. You’re reading the poetry of Anne Bradstreet, you are interviewing experts on Puritan litigation such as El Qin Vin Roth. I like both. I am thrilled to do a deep dive into the secondary sources, you know and read. I mean, the great thing about the Puritans is they were avid diarists, they chronicle everything because they spend every waking moment trying To decide, am I saved? Or damned. That was literally the principal concern they had. It wasn’t just finding beer, a beer was really important to them. I mean, they drink, like it was Spring Break in Miami. But when you’re dealing with primary sources, you know, the human beings. That’s where you get these unbelievable golden nuggets that surprised you. And so when I was writing The Light in the Ruins, which is, you know, as he said, it said, in Italy in the 1950s, or the 1940s, or Skeletons at the Feast, which is set in the Eastern Front in 1944, 1945, I would be deeply moved. utterly horrified. In the space of five minutes of conversation, by the things, people would tell me the sandcastle girls was a little bit like that, too, right? Most survivors of the Armenian Genocide were dead by 2010, or 2011. But their children were alive, right? I’m alive, you know, grandchildren, and the stories that parents told their children and the children’s trauma was present. And that’s really, really important to get that trauma down in paper, we know that trauma is transmitted genetically at least, I believe that from what I’ve read, that trauma is in our genes. And when you’re writing historical fiction, the kind that I write, there will be blood and there will be trauma.
B&N: You’ve done three books in three years. Do I have that right? The Red Lotus went straight into Hour the Witch went into The Lioness. That’s a lot even with a pandemic. That’s a lot. But what’s next?
CB: The Princess of Las Vegas, and Las Vegas is a character. But I will tell you that I thought the book was pretty much done in February. But I was ahead of the Zeitgeist and it’s gonna have to change because the basic premise is about Russian oligarchs laundering money at a Las Vegas casino that now accepts crypto. All of a sudden Russian oligarchs aren’t funny. No, it’s just frightening. Yeah. Secondly, the sanctions we had in place previously are very different than the sanctions we have now. And finally, I have no idea what in holy heck, crypto is going to be a year from now and whether any casino will want anything to do with crypto. So The Princess of Las Vegas is rolling on but it’s changing. And it’s a good thing that I don’t give a darn about outlines, or, you know, big dry erase boards, because if I did, I’d be pulling out my hair at this point. It’s just having fun with a very particular kind of tribute impersonator in Las Vegas, who’s not Elvis.
B&N: I think there’s a lot to look forward. And this is just it sounds wild in all of the best ways. Chris Bohjalian. Thank you so much. The Lioness is out in hardcover, Hour of the Witch is one of 22 paperbacks with Chris’s name on them that you can pick up right now. And The Princess of Las Vegas will grace us when she does, and she does.
CB: Yes. Thank you so much. Miwa, Thank you. You’re the best. I had so much fun. I loved your questions, and thank you for celebrating what words and reading and books can mean to the soul.
B&N: I listen, I love doing what I did. Thanks again.