Poured Over: Kiley Reid on Come and Get It
“I am of the mind that a novel should not leave you with a thesis … I think a novel should reflect the deep parts of human behavior in such an accurate way that a wormhole forms…”
With themes of race and class in a college town, Kiley Reid’s Come and Get It balances characters you can’t get enough of with a nonstop plot. Reid joins us to talk about money and marriage, power dynamics in academia, creating her crackling dialogue and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.
This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.
New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.
Featured Books (Episode):
Come and Get It by Kiley Reid
Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
Paying for the Party by Elizabeth A. Armstrong & Laura T. Hamilton
Monoculture by F.S. Michaels
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
Full Episode Transcript
Miwa Messer
Well, hello, New York, it is always nice to see you guys live in a store. I’m Miwa Messer the producer and host of Poured Over and it is my great good fortune to be sharing a stage with Kiley Reid who I had been looking forward to this. We confirmed this event like months ago and I had been bopping around like a perky perky cheerleader, almost like I could have gone to the University of Arkansas, which I did not. I did not and my colleagues can tell you I’m not really that perky. More importantly, I’m very happy to see you. And hey, New York. Are you ready to come and get it? Okay. Sorry, couldn’t resist. All right, so we’re back. Such a Fun Age was 2019 which suddenly, because it’s pre pandemic feels a really long time ago was a different time. Yeah, it really was. I want to talk about how we got to Milly, and Agatha and Kennedy and Colleen, and Rylan. And who am I missing? Oh, Jenna, and Peyton? There’s a lot of Tyler. Yeah, but I like all of these characters. Okay, Josh, maybe what? I have some feelings about Josh. But how do we get here?
Kiley Reid
It was before Such a Fun Age even came out. So I had finished Such a Fun Age and sold it in between my first and second year of grad school. And I didn’t want to waste grad school. Like I’d had a job before. And I knew like you should write something. And so I started interviewing students of mine. 10 months before Such a Fun Age came out, I knew I wanted to write about young people, and money. That’s all I knew. And then I read the book called Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality. It’s written by two sociologists. And they interviewed women in a Midwestern dorm for five years and track their finances and their outcomes and their socio-economic background. And I just loved the premise of these academic women interviewing these young women. And so I pretty much did that and interviewed some of my students and Starbucks workers, and anyone who would talk to me, and that’s where we started.
MM
I remember a lot of the press from Such a Fun Age, where you would just come out and say, Well, I really do want to make people cringe, as they read and cringe in a good way. Right? Like you guys have read Such a Fun Age, you know what I’m talking about. But I don’t know if it’s me or you I was cringing a lot less. I was just wide eyed as I was reading because it was like, hmm, I guess we’re gonna have this conversation about money, aren’t we, because that is kind of the last thing like, I know things about my friends that I love them. But I don’t maybe need to know all of that. But we don’t talk about money. We do not talk about money. So I love the idea that you have planted yourself firmly in the place where we are going to have this conversation.
KR
I love talking about money.
MM
I know. And I was raised in Boston, you know, we duct taped our shoes, and we don’t talk about what we drive and things like that. But I want to talk about these women. And I want to talk about actually the generational shift, right? So we’ve got Agatha, the professor, we’ve got Millie who’s an RA. And then we’ve got this layer of students. And you do that thing that you do when you open a book. We’re right there. No one opens a novel like Kiley and Agatha is interviewing Tyler, Jenna, and Casey about their feelings about marriage. And I’m thinking it’s 2023, we’re still talking about marriage. Okay. And yet, you had me from the first sentence. So can we talk about the structure and how you decide this is what we’re going to do? I mean, weddings and money. That’s kind of that’s, that’s a way to open this book.
KR
I did think that I would start with an interview and I love first chapters that combine people who wouldn’t normally be together. And I think that your first chapter is teaching your reader how to read your novel. There’s a lot of overhearing and gossiping and I think you’re telling your audience this is about gossip here. But I did do a lot of throat clearing, I wrote an 80 page RA orientation scene and I deleted all of it. It was really painful. But sometimes you have to do that to understand who these characters are. And you got to find the best place to drop in and that just wasn’t it. So I started with the interview scene. I felt like we were showing you a lot of characters I slowed down a bit. That’s typically what I think works for me.
MM
So your editor passed me a manuscript. I can’t even remember when. And I read 50 pages. It was not what you guys are experiencing. But I did read the opening twice, because I was just like, okay. And the voice was there. And I mean, narrative voice, right. Like, I mean, we have a cast in both books. And there’s overlap. I mean, there’s overlap and thematically and but I was so happy to hear your voice in my ear again. And I was like, Oh, right. It’s been a minute since we’ve been here. It’s been a minute. And the New York Times called this I thought this was kind of funny that Julia major has called this out the brand names thing. You know, who else pulled off the brand names thing in a book? Like couple decades ago? American Psycho, right. Like that was a, it was a tool in American Psycho. And I’m like, okay, okay. Okay. I was having a tiny moment. And then I realized, I’m being introduced to these college kids. And my freshman year in college was a while ago. And I may not remember much of it. And I really like these kids.
KR
I’m so glad I like them, too. And there are satirical elements within writing. But I did not want to make fun of college kids. And how they’re super lazy and uninteresting. And a lot of my students were really bright and clever. And they were also sometimes racist, like, people are all of those things the same time. And so this was just showing young people in their dorms at the top of their intelligence one minute, making huge mistakes the other times, and yeah, that was the goal for me, their babies. 19 is baby.
MM
I mean, luckily, I don’t really remember the things I didn’t know when I was 19. But I am a card carrying adult now. I can, I can do all sorts of things, including laundry and pay my bills, but it really is driven by women. This is really, and it’s not a single…
KR
I mean, there’s two men, I think, that I don’t like men are they just, this is a book about buying things. This is a book that’s majorly about consumption. And what we do when we’re alone, and the things that we buy and what they say about us, I think that women have the opportunity to buy a lot more things. And then for the most part, and they’re marketed a lot more things like, Target is a big part of this book, when you walk into Target that big section that’s like, are you going on like a book club or ladies night or whatever, there’s all these things are like “buy this woman”. And so I think that that’s why I gravitate towards more women, because when it comes to buying things, that’s who’s buying a lot of things.
MM
I will totally own the fact that I just did do a buy online at Target for a vacuum cleaner. I just showed my age right there. I’m just like, my vacuum cleaner died. I really don’t want to have to go through all of it. I just really want the thing. Can I please just give you my American Express. Tyler, and Peyton and Kennedy are the roommates. Jenna, and Carrie are Tyler’s friends. All of them have very distinctive voices. Yes. And yet, regionally they’re, it’s not like when kids from California are ones from Baltimore, or ones from Boston. They’re all from roughly the same area. They’re at a state school, they’ve had similar experiences, for the most part. Yep. And yet, every one of these women is distinct.
KR
That was really important to me, there is a homogeny within college towns and I lived in Fayetteville for a year, young women would walk down the street and the exact same outfits and I was like, oh, there must be an event. And then the next day, I was like, there must be another. And they just all dressed the exact same way. And I learned it was called lamp shading, where you wear a big T shirt, and then little shorts underneath and you’re like a lamp or whatever. So I wanted them to have the same cultural aesthetics. Because a lot of my students spoke the same way that I thought was really interesting. When my students, when I would tell them, hey, can you say more on that a lot of them would say in the exact same way. Oh my gosh, I hate telling about this. And I think that that’s why I made the book, there was something so tender and specific and delicate in the way that they said that. And I wanted to figure out how to make characters who had that culture, but we’re very, very different. Jenna is obscene in her comparisons. Like if anything wrong happens to her she’s like wow, I’m like in the Indian Removal Act or whatever. And it’s like no, you’re not Casey is really academically driven and she’s one from from Alabama. Tyler is mean and Tyler is the one kind of true working class character but she has so much cultural cachet and knows how to wield her power that that she kind of avoids any scrutiny over that you out. There’s a lot of young people in here, but I hope they’re just staying.
MM
Tyler wants a puppy. And that carries a lot of weight. But I love that that’s the detail, right? That’s how I know I’m reading you. Because you find those little details on a mine. Okay, Tyler wants a puppy. Oh, no, Tyler wants a puppy full stop. This will come into play and part of these women and being around these young women. And this idea of a flattening of culture, right? Like algorithms may have a little more to do with our lives than we would like them to do or would like to pretend that they don’t kind of thing. But these women are genuinely who they are, you know, cell phones are not necessarily driving their interaction, social media isn’t driving there. They’re in and out of each other’s dorm rooms, they’re in and out of each other’s sidewalk. They just, there is a physical connection there. But they’re still really lonely and a little isolated. And the way you talk about loneliness, and the way you talk about individuality, is really hard to do without sounding patronizing, which you never do. How are you constructing those voice? How are you keeping these kids straight? How are you letting them be themselves on the page? Because you do still kind of have a point to make. I mean, you’re writing a novel for a reason?