Poured Over: Sara Novic on True Biz

“True Biz is an ASL idiom. It doesn’t have one direct translation into English, but a few of the things that it could mean: seriously, literally. Real talk is one that I think gets used a lot. No kidding. Like, if someone says like, No, you made that up, no true biz, you know, and I thought that it was a good title for the book, because it doesn’t quite translate directly into English.” We’ve been fans of Sara Nović since her page-turning, coming-of-age debut, Girl at War. Sara’s back with a new novel, True Biz, which she calls both a “coming-of-age and a coming-of-middle-age” story set at a school for the Deaf. She joins us on the show to talk about CODA’s Oscars, Deaf culture and degrees of Deaf experience, punk rock, the fluidity of ASL and how best to represent it on the printed page, giving her Deaf characters agency and the space to be real teenagers, writing joy into her story and much more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. And we end the episode with a TBR Topoff segment featuring Margie and Marc.

Featured Books:

True Biz by Sara Nović

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer. This episode was mixed by Chris Gillespie. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays) here, and on your favorite podcast app.

Full transcript for this episode of Poured Over:

Barnes & Noble: I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the host and producer of Poured Over and I am so so so excited to have Sara Nović taping with us today because last night, CODA won two Academy Awards, one for Best Picture and one for Best Supporting Actor. But more importantly, she told me about True Biz, somewhere in 2016, maybe 2015. I’m not entirely sure at this point. And I have been waiting for this novel. And I cannot wait for everyone else to be able to read it, too. So Hi, Sarah. I’m so happy to see you.

Sara Nović: Hi, I’m so happy to be here. It’s great to see you. It’s been so long.

B&N: I know. So, can we talk about CODA for two seconds because this is a historic moment. I mean, Troy Kotsur, the second deaf actor to win an Oscar behind Marlee Matlin who’s also in this movie, but also it’s charming. And the parents steal the show, Troy and Marlee absolutely steal the entire show. But what was it like for you, when you realized this movie had just won the Best Picture?

SN: Whew! What a night last night I was it was a wild ride, that whole Oscar show, I was just thrilled for Troy, I think, you know, he carried that movie on his back. And his performance was so good and so funny, and so filthy. And it was, was delightful to watch. And I’m so glad he won. CODA, I think is having like, more mixed reactions within the Deaf community just because, you know, there are some things that it gets totally right. And some things that it still gets wrong, because at the end of the day, it’s written by a hearing person, it’s centered, you know, the main character. It’s a predominantly Deaf cast, and yet the main character is still the one hearing person. You know, so these are like things that I think continue to frustrate people. But at the end of the day, like, I’ve really enjoyed watching the movie, I thought it was funny. I was like, there to be emotionally manipulated by it, just take me down, you know, I want to go, you know, I love seeing ASL on the screen. It’s script, that’s something like 40% of the movie is in ASL. And that’s pretty unprecedented. That was just really exciting for me to watch for sure.

B&N: There’s a moment, too, where the daughter is singing at school. And then suddenly, the sound cuts out, which is obviously really intentional. But it’s wild, the shift and the silence. And it’s like, oh, right, of course, the parents and the older brother who are all deaf are watching the audience for their reactions, because they can’t, they’re not having the same experience as everyone else. And it’s kind of amazing. I should also note, we are making a full written transcript of this episode available on the BN Reads blog. And also in the show notes, there’ll be a link. So the entire thing will be there. We just need a minute to get it together. More importantly, I want to talk about the title True Biz for a second, because it’s really important, what it means throughout this book. And would you just explain the origin of True Biz.

SN: True Biz is an ASL idiom. It doesn’t have like one direct translation into English, but a few of the things that it could mean are like, seriously, literally, real talk is one that I think gets used a lot. No kidding. Like, if someone says like, No, you made that up, no true biz, you know, and I thought that it was a good title for the book, because it doesn’t quite translate directly into English. Like I liked that about the phrase, obviously, it’s an important phrase within the context of the story, plot wise too, and when I’m reading something, I like that moment when I get to see the title in the book. That was like, gratifying for me as a reader, writer person. But yeah, I also liked the fact that it’s like, it’s not quite English. But hopefully, throughout the course of the book, the reader kind of comes to feel comfortable familiar with it.

B&N: One of the things I love about the structure of this book is not only are the ASL illustrations included at really specific points, and we’re gonna cover some of them, because there’s some stuff that’s very cool. Especially, you have a moment where one of the characters realizes how brittle English is, because she’s finally getting up to speed and ASL. And it’s a really wonderful moment in the story. But we’re going to come back to that. But the way you capture that visual moment, and in some cases, it’s as simple as a division into columns on the page, because the characters are signing to each other. And the way the language flows, you always knew you were going to have to treat the structure of this book a little differently from your earlier novel, Girl at War, just because of who you were working with and whatnot. But when did you know you had the form?

SN: The ASL dialogue was something that I freaked out about for a long time, because obviously ASL is a 3D language. And to put it on paper kind of means to flatten it in a way. So I played for a while with different ways that that could work. And one of the more obvious things that I thought about first was, well, maybe I can just write it out in ASL syntax, but ASL syntax is pretty much backwards from English. So then I was I was worried that a hearing reader would see that and be like, Oh, broken English. And you know, for these characters ASL is better than English, right? It’s clearer than English. So that’s when I decided like, No, it’s not about syntax. It’s about space. And so the way that the dialogue works in the book is basically spatial version of dialogue text, because if I’m signing to you, and I’m telling you a story, I can kind of set people up around me in space. And then if I point back to that space later, you as the listener will know like, who I, you remember where I put those people? So that’s basically what’s happening is that people are kind of speaking from their different places on the page.

B&N: Brittany Castle did the illustrations for True Biz. And they’re fun, and they’re lively. And her illustrations are fantastic. And you have this great line, there’s a piece that she does, and it’s called Visual syntax and the Art of Storytelling. And then you make a note underneath that says, When forming phrases or narratives and ASL, ask yourself what order makes the most sense visually. And when I hit that line in the story, I was like, oh, all of this makes perfect sense because we’re with this one character as she’s learning ASL. And the way you plot it out is just really smart. And I feel like as Charlie is figuring out what’s going on, the reader is brought in, but I think is really clever and smart.

SN: Thanks. Brittany is a genius. And I’m so glad I nabbed her do these illustrations because I’ve been a fan of her work for a long time. And I knew that I wanted these kind of like pages of they’re essentially like workbook pages or something. But when I was writing the book, I was just kind of like stealing images from the internet and copy and pasting just so I could like show Random House like this is what I want, you know, but then I was really happy that Brittany said yes, and drew all these pictures. She’s super talented.

B&N: So let’s set up the story. I know I keep coming back to this one character who as you can tell I’m very fond of. So there’s Charlie, and there’s Austin. And then there’s their headmistress, February. The three of them are really kind of the heart of the thing. We meet other classmates, we meet February’s wife, we meet February’s mom, and Charlie’s parents and Austin’s parents and Austin’s little sister, who factors into the story as well. But let’s start with those three. And let’s set up the story for folks who haven’t yet experienced True Biz.

SN: True Biz is set at a school for the deaf. It’s a residential school and we’re most deaf schools. That means you live there during the weekend, then you go home on the weekend. Charlie is new, she has a cochlear implant, it doesn’t really work. And it’s also like getting worse, giving her bad headaches, something’s wrong with it. And that’s kind of where we start with her. Her parents get divorced. And her dad kind of gets primary custody and says, All right, like this is obviously not working. She’s failing out of school. And he transfers her to River Valley School for the Deaf. That’s kind of the start of the story chronologically, and Austin is already there. He’s kind of like the school’s golden boy. And he’s from multigenerational deaf family. He’s super fluent in ASL, like, that’s his first language. And then February is kind of the person between them who, is I think of her as a foil for Charlie in a lot of ways. She’s a coda. So she’s a child of deaf adults. She has ASL as her first language. She’s kind of a code switcher. But she’s like, not exactly of either world. She’s going through some big things in her life, Charlie’s obviously coming of age, I kind of like to call this book, a coming-of-age story and a coming-of-middle-age story, because the way that they’re kind of bumping up against these like big life events that they’re ill equipped for, mirror each other. And those two characters, those are three main players.

B&N: Okay, so who showed up first, I sort of feel like it was Charlie, but I don’t want to make assumptions there.

SN: Yes, Charlie was a short story that just got bigger and bigger. So she definitely existed before Austin and February. But then Elliott, another character who kind of shows up later probably existed before all of them. He was a short story, as well. And then I actually wrote out like, 100 pages of Elliott’s story that never made it into the book. So he was maybe the earliest guy, but I had all these deaf characters kind of floating around. And then I was like, what happened if they all met? And that’s kind of where I started with True Biz.

B&N: Okay, so wait, you started with the characters, not just the idea of trying to capture Deaf culture, because I say deaf with a capital D, because it is a culture. And there’s actually a very cool thing that I learned from your book as well that I want to get to about how deafness can be an ethnicity. But how did True Biz start? I mean, is it the idea or did suddenly these characters just say, Okay, we’re here? Hi.

SN: Charlie was a short story that I started writing because I read an article that was about one of the lawsuits that was being settled with Advanced Bionics and people were having and all these kinds of really foul side effects from their cochlear implants, like, including being electrocuted, and I couldn’t stop thinking about like, if this had been another kind of prosthesis like would this have been a bigger story? Or is it so ingrained in people that like, this is a miracle cure and like it can do no wrong? And that’s why like, no one ever heard that all these things, were kind of going wrong with the implants. And then I was just kind of fascinated like, what would that feel like if that was inside your head. And so that was kind of the impetus for writing, Charlie. And there were earlier versions of that story too where like, her mom was like a dance teacher. And there was like, a lot of time with her at the dance studio and kind of just like, them not understanding each other in that way. And so then when she kind of descends into the world of punk rock, it was like her coming to learn about music, in a completely like different and separate way from like, the stuff that her mom kind of values and tried to push upon her, I guess.

B&N: Charlie’s dad seems to be having a better go of it. He’s learning ASL. And she’s surprised to learn that he’s picking it up pretty quickly. And her mom still struggles with trying to give Charlie what she considers a quote unquote, normal upbringing. So you’ve got the sort of classic mother daughter butting heads kind of thing. But it’s really aggravated, in a lot of ways, by Charlie’s mom wanting to not accept her kid for who her kid is.

SN: It feels really specialized in the way that it plays out here. But it’s kind of a universal experience where we have moms, it just can’t wrap their head around the fact that the thing that they thought was best is just it isn’t. It’s not like Charlie’s mom is doing something, because she is mean or like, of mal intent, she really thinks that this is the thing that she should be doing. But she’s just really wrong. Let me see that in all kinds of relationships, I think.

B&N: And again, it’s the universality that you find in the details of someone else’s life, right. I mean, we read fiction to learn to be more empathetic, right, and to put ourselves into someone else’s world, but you do intersperse the narrative with history and facts. And literally one of the things you say in this piece about Deaf mythology is deaf scholars have proven that deafness meets the requirements to be considered an ethnicity. And I want to sit with this for a second, because schools for the Deaf are closing at a somewhat alarming rate. And of course, as you say, money is determining a lot of the kind of care and response that the constituency gets. But can we talk about that for a second? How do we define Deafness as an ethnicity?

SN: I think it’s mostly related to the language. You know, Deaf culture is an is inextricable form an ASL or, you know, if you’re elsewhere, whatever the sign language of that community is also having a shared history, having shared values and having a shared space. And that’s the thing that’s kind of disappearing in these Deaf schools, which are hubs for the community or previously there, you know, Deaf clubs, which Charlie kind of misunderstands at some point in the book, but they were physical spaces. And they’re not a homeland exactly in the way that we understand it. But they were kind of functioning as like this gathering point. Deaf culture and the Deaf community is really different from traditional way that we think about cultures because it doesn’t have like a geographic anchor. It brings together people of all different classes, all different races, backgrounds, and you’re different from your parents. So that’s a big thing. I think the horizontal transmission of Deaf culture is maybe a reason why some people don’t understand it. And there are a lot of parallels drawn between like the queer community and the Deaf community in that way, right. Like, you’re not getting that from your parents, but you’re kind of getting it from your peers. So Alexander Graham Bell, I think, was actually the person who understood this well, and to a disturbing effect. While I was doing research, I read a lot of his letters, I understood Alexander Graham Bell previously to be, you know, not a good guy, kind of the villain figure in the Deaf community. But like previously, my understanding of him was like he was doing this because he thought it was the best educational philosophy. He wanted Deaf people to speak because he thought like, this was the best way to educate them. But then I read all of his letters, and I realized that he was really enormous, xenophobe, white supremacist, nativist and all of his letters are like Deaf people need to speak English and everyone needs to speak English and this is America and like his philosophy is just straight up white supremacy. So I think he kind of unwittingly further establishes this link between Deaf culture and ethnicity or, or a culture that’s tied to the language.

B&N: What I didn’t understand about ASL until I read True Biz, too, is exactly how fluid it is. It’s amazing to me what you can do to signify the passage of time or point of view where you’re saying, Oh, no, no, if you’re telling stories, like it’s not necessarily just another person that you’re telling, you can tell the point of view of an inanimate object or an animal or a tree. And I love that because it’s so much more expansive. And the idea that you can do so much and Charlie’s sitting in the lunchroom, and she realizes like how brittle and rough English is and how much more she can do and how much more expansive ASL is. And the idea too, that there are dialects I think it was in a piece on CODA that I was reading, it actually might have been you on another podcast talking about learning the dialect and Massachusetts for the Rossi family like how do you say crab? How do you say lobster? How do you say these things in sign language. And I love the idea that you can have all of those different kinds of exchanges. There’s also Black ASL, which a couple of your characters, I mean, Austin’s a good kid, he means well, but he doesn’t know everything. And wow, that comes up in a lot of different ways. And also his baby sister is born and she can hear.

SN: Yeah, so that was a surprise. Austin’s having a tough time. He’s really finding out that he’s grown up in a world where he’s been fully comfortable, like he has full access 100% of the time. That’s not the case for nearly any Deaf kid. Only about 8% of parents learn ASL for their kid. It’s bad, bad time. So it’s funny because he has like so much access. He’s so comfortable. He actually misses some big things, including that interaction with Kayla, like it just doesn’t occur to him that he wouldn’t be the one who’s right, right, because he always knows everything about ASL and the birth of his sister and her being hearing and how that affects his family. His mom is Deaf, his dad’s a hearing interpreter. So that was a little bit of like a genetic time bomb, that his mom warded off with his birth and then at the birth of Skye, they kind of have to contend with are we going to put our money where our mouth is when it comes to like all these things that we say we value in the Deaf community, particularly when it’s like under threat and the way that it comes to be.

B&N: One of the things I really appreciate, too, about Austin and Charlie is the fact that they are teenagers. They’re messy, they make mistakes, their hormones are completely out of control. It’s adorable. Elliot, Austin’s roommate. Kayla is Charlie’s roommate. And Charlie. I mean, at one point, she’s rolling. She’s at a punk show. She’s just all over the place. And Austin sort of follows her down this rabbit hole, we’re gonna stay away from a piece of the story only because it’s such a genuine surprise, involves one of Charlie’s old cohorts from her previous school where she was just sort of, do we call it mainstreaming? That feels really? I don’t know, that just feels like a gross way to describe.

SN: We do and it is.

B&N: So it’s not just me. But this scene where Charlie is dancing and ends up having sex with this old boyfriend, whatever. It’s so great to just see these kids being kids. Yes, they happen to be Deaf. And yes, it is a big part of their culture, but they’re still sneaking out of school and they’re still lying to their parents. Like they’re just teenagers. And this is also something that February really appreciate. She’s like, I like teenagers. I think they get short shrift. Like she really likes being a Headmistress. She likes being a teacher. She believes in these kids. She believes in the community.

SN: Yeah, those, I’m glad you enjoyed them as teenagers because they’re a mess in a lot of ways. And that’s what’s delightful about them. To me, I think people read or see that books have teenagers in them. And they’re like, Oh, it’s a YA book. But I think that there’s so much that we can kind of learn and take from teenage experiences, not only because of the fact that we all used to be them, but also just because of like the way that they’re navigating this current world is different from the way that the adults are navigating it. And I think that those tensions are really interesting. But yeah, it was important for me to write Deaf characters that were having sex doing drugs. I think that a lot of times we see this very chaste or infantilized version of disabled characters like, who do we have? There’s Tiny Tim, you know, the first time I saw that character on the page was probably The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and like, that’s a tough way to go in is like, you are the receptacle for all of hearing people’s thoughts and feelings and then you can go crazy and die. So the biggest thing was In writing a really Deaf book, I wanted all of these Deaf characters to have agency. And I wanted them to be having different kinds of experiences of Deafness. Like so often we have, if we get a Deaf character, like, there’s one, he’s by himself, he’s isolated. So I wanted Deafness to be the normal thing. And then all the variations that I could get across. And like Charlie struggles with that when she gets to a rally, right? Because she was like, I’m not the Deaf girl anymore. So like, now what do I do?

B&N: Yeah, I love that moment where she realizes that she has to figure out and identity and also she’s pushed into being a theater kid by her headmistress, February, who’s like, you need an activity, you need to make friends, you need to get an activity, like you can’t just sit in your room and stare at a wall like and Charlie’s going, you’ve got to be kidding me. Like you’re making me be a theater kid. And ultimately, it is very good thing for her. And it does bring us to a moment that we’re also going to let people discover on their own because I have to admit, I gasped when I realized what happened. Yeah, yeah, no, no, it was very good. It was very, very good. Because you had been sort of leading us up to this point. And I was like, Oh, that makes perfect sense. But wow. And yeah, I’m teasing it. And yeah, I want people to read this book. I appreciate Charlie so much, because she is like, she’s a messy, angry teenager, and she’s not interested in being perfect at all, she just kind of wants to survive. And I think that is a baseline for a lot of teenagers where they’re like, I don’t need to be first in my class, I just need to have a friend or something. And she doesn’t even know if she wants friends, to be honest.

SN: Yeah, no. She’s got a lot of feelings. And she has multiple feelings that want and that’s something that I really like about her. She’s kind of pushing back against this idea of like, even the kind of vague love triangle that she kind of finds herself in is like, actually, you don’t have to like pick one thing you can kind of, she’s also a code switcher. And she’s kind of between all these things, too. That’s another way that I kind of see her and February linking up.

B&N: Let’s talk a little bit more about their relationship. Because February knows who Charlie is. And Charlie’s just like, oh great, another adult who wants to tell me what to do. I’m so over this. But February certainly understands are better than our parents do. For sure. And idea of what Charlie might stupidly think is a good idea which, again, thank you February. But as you said, February’s personal life is a mess, she and her wife are having a very rough go of it, she’s just had to put her mother into elder care, which she did not want to do. And she’s dealing with the political complications of how the community outside of the school sees the school. It’s a lot. It’s a lot.

SN: Yeah, February has a lot on her plate. And I think, you know, February sees Charlie, in part just because she’s good at her job. And she’s been doing it for a long time. And she like, knows that situations that, you know, she knows, understands language deprivation, she understands kind of like what happens to kids in the mainstream on that level. But I also think that she sees something in Charlie like, in a way, they’re both kind of trying to prove themselves. February is trying to prove almost that she is like Deaf enough, even though she’s not Deaf at all. And Charlie doesn’t really know what she’s trying to prove at the beginning. But like just that she’s not her mom. For starters, they kind of have opposite relationships with their mom that that lead them to behave in similar ways, which I think is interesting. And also from the opening pages of the books. And this is not a spoiler, this is the literal first page of the book, February will resort to violence when necessary. And that’s kind of something that she and Charlie share. So I think February recognizes things in her as an educator, but also just like as another woman, for sure.

B&N: It’s a complete corker of an opening was not at all what I expect. It’s a great way to show us who February is very, very quickly.

SN: Yeah, hearing people, beware. It’s a tough couple of paragraphs.

B&N: Do you have a favorite moment from True Biz?

SN: Yeah, I really like when Charlie is out doing drugs, you know, that night is kind of a magical night for her. And that’s her moment of agency. You know, that’s the first time when she kind of realizes like, I can take this into my own hands. And, you know, for better or worse, what that becomes, I think that it’s empowering for her and I liked writing it. And I really like the way things unfolded in the final pages too, because it speaks a little bit to what you were saying about role shift and like who tells a story so that was fun to play with, and try to kind of infuse a little bit of Deaf storytelling into the final pages of the book as much as is possible in English.

B&N: You said you’d written 100 pages of Elliot’s story. And his story is harrowing. He’s a sweet kid, but his story is harrowing. Are we ever going to see more of Elliot? Or do you think this is Elliot’s experiences, you know it now there’s something else that’s gonna happen?

SN: I love Elliot, he was like, maybe my secret favorite character. And he’s also on the continuum of Deaf experiences. He’s somewhere in the middle for until, like, the terrible thing happens to him. He’s in the middle, where it’s like, he actually has parents who learned to sign with him, but he’s like, most of the time in the hearing world. So I do miss some of the stuff of Elliot’s that got cut out. But I think that for the sake of the book, keeping a lot of the stuff that happened was away from campus. So kind of like keeping him at school and keeping everyone at school makes more sense for the book as like an object. But Elliot’s story is important to me, because like, I didn’t want this book to become a thing like, implants bad. You know, it’s it’s not about that. If it wasn’t implants, it would be something else, right? And Elliot’s family is trying to fix him in a different way. And that’s what Deaf people have been up against, since the beginning of time. I think his story is really important. And kind of showing the continuum of this isn’t like a debate about a specific piece of technology. It’s just a question of whether or not Deaf people can and should be allowed to exist as part of the diverse human experience.

B&N: So much joy in this book, it’s messy, teenage joy but there’s a lot of joy in this book, even as these kids are figuring out every single kid on this campus is having an accent, maybe Gabrielle because she knows everything and whatever. She’ll have her day. When did you know you had their voices? It’s been a minute, since you’ve been a teenager.

SN: I don’t know, Charlie came easy in terms of the voice. And like, I’ve been writing this for a while. And the things that changed, were all different kinds of plot things and order things. And like, you know, there were times actually, I think, when I first started writing this book, I was writing everybody in the first person, even though they were kind of like rotating perspective, still, as they are now. And then it switched to close third. That’s the first long thing I’ve ever written in third person. So that was hard. But their voices were always kind of like the first part that I had. And then I had to figure out what they were doing. It was definitely a character first situation. And maybe that’s because two of them came out of short stories. So I kind of knew discreetly who they were, but then I had to figure out like, what happens when you talk to him? And what happened, you know, so it was definitely more of like, a tangle of weaving their stories together. That was the work of it. Whereas the voice I felt like I knew first.

B&N: Are you reading for character, when you’re just reading for pleasure or reading for research? I mean, is character the thing you’re drawn to first?

SN: I’ll follow a good character pretty much anywhere as a reader, for sure. I think I like a plot. And I hope that this book moves, plot wise as well. But I’m happy to to like go deep down a rabbit hole with a character if I feel like I have access to their thoughts and feelings, which is the most exciting thing to me that I can get from a book that you can’t really get anywhere else, right? Even a film like you could get a great story, but it’s hard to get deep in somebody’s state of mind. And that’s what books do best. I think.

B&N: Okay, and as a reader, I can tell you the plot of True Biz totally moves, it goes in really smart ways towards an ending that feels really organic and inevitable, but inevitable in a good way. Yeah, I just really love your characters. I know I keep coming back to Charlie and Austin and February because they are sort of the heart of the thing. But even Charlie’s parents and Austin’s parents and all of the sort of secondary and tertiary characters we meet I just I really love this cast entirely. Can we talk about some of your literary influences though? Because you have an MFA, you teach. Who are you reaching for?

SN: This opening of this book was definitely like 100% homage to Celeste Ng, I think I have always loved the way that she tells you the end of the book and like the first paragraph, and then she’s like, Yeah, but you’re gonna read the rest of this book. Like you’re gonna devour trying to find out why that was like the big one, for me. I was like, What happens if I tell you that these three students go missing in the first two pages of the book, and I have to still get you to care. Like I think that’s a cool challenge. And something that I’ve just like, always in awe of Celeste’s books, so that was definitely a big one.

B&N: One of the other things I really appreciate is how you allow all of your characters to have their complexities and you allow the story to represent a much bigger piece of the community than I think anyone outside knows exists. I knew cochlear implants were slightly controversial. But I didn’t know that there were recalls all of these little details that even if it’s not part of your day to day life, they make the characters real. If you’re a parent, and your kid has an implant, and it goes bad, I can only imagine how that feels. And it’s kind of a completely horrible.

SN: Yeah, I think most of the coverage that we see of implants is kind of this strict binary, because it’s, it’s, like easy for the media to split it this way. Or it’s maybe even fun. I don’t know. But you know, there’s no reason why if you have a cochlear implant, you can’t also learn to sign I mean, it’s like saying, you know, oh, well, you want your kid to speak English. So don’t teach them French, like it doesn’t make any sense. So that was something like I wanted to explore in this book, because it is such a big issue for so many families and people and a lot of it comes down to people just not having the information and the resources. So like, Charlie’s mom has her chapter, she kind of mentioned that, like, it was the doctors that told her that she wasn’t supposed to sign with her kid. And that is the true experience of, you know, the vast majority of of people who are getting medical advice on this subject. And Charlie’s mom is the only one actually who is in first person her chapter, I think she could come across as like a really tough character, unlikable character, because we spend so much time with Charlie and Charlie’s a teenager. And Charlie is like really fricken annoyed at her mom. So I wanted to give her mom a minute to like, say her piece. And then with the rest of the characters, like I’m so happy to see you saying that you found joy in this book, because I think that it’s easy for representations of marginalized people to go down like a depressing road, because there are all these challenges. And they do exist in this book, too. But like, I wanted joy for these characters, there is a lot of joy for me in the Deaf community and for a lot of people like in that communion. So I think that’s important. And there’s also pettiness and racism, which was something that like I wanted to show too, because again, like I don’t want this angelic representation, and needed a lot of cast of characters to get some of that nuance. And, you know, there’s still people missing. That’s such a big, diverse community. But I hope that there’s like maybe a good cross section in here. One of the moments when I started thinking like, Okay, I’m going to tie all the short story characters together was, I was in Ohio. I was feeling really isolated, and culture shocked and weird, because I’m like a very hard East Coast human. And then I walked by this Deaf school, it was a small private deaf school. And these these teenagers came out of the dorm. And they were like, very obviously, sneaking out of the dorm. It was nighttime. I just, like started chatting with them in ASL. And I felt like that transported me back home, just like being able to sign with them. And you know, we had nothing in common. They were kids, I was myself an adult, but like, instantly took me like back. I was like, Okay, I’m grounded. I’m back. I’m okay. And they were hilarious. And they were like, Oh, you are from New York. Like, we want to go to New York, you know, so. So I was telling themabout the city. And they were, you know, I don’t know what they were up to. But I didn’t rat on them. And I hope they had a good night. And they, yeah, they brought me joy in that moment. And I was like, that’s what I want to write about this feeling of like, wherever you go, if you find another Deaf person, then you get to be home again.

B&N: I kind of have an idea of what’s next for you because you’ve sold the television rights for True Biz. And Millicent Simmons from a quiet place is attached to star which is really exciting. So maybe we’ll see more Elliot there, maybe we’ll see more of the other kids that we don’t necessarily get to meet because you have a little more time to fill when you’re doing a series, whether it’s streaming or television or what. So here’s a question for you though. Deadline Hollywood describes you in their copy about the streaming sale as a Deaf activist and you teach Deaf studies you are Deaf. You’ve written a novel about Deaf capital D community. But what does it means to be a Deaf activist?

SN: It is one of those things where I feel like the bar is low that a lot of it is just justifying that we exist and we should be allowed to exist like even when I’m teaching Deaf studies, a lot of the work that I’m doing as the professor teaching the class is like trying to convince my students that I’m as smart as them, which is frightening but it’s true. Like it’s so deeply seated that these stereotypes that Deafness is attached to one’s intelligence that, you know, signing is inferior to speech that it’s a lot. A lot of activism for the disabled community, I think is a really, really basic steps of like, we should be allowed and public, we should be allowed to be alive, you shouldn’t delete us out of the genome, these kinds of things. So I wish it was more nuanced and exciting and explosive. But it’s actually just a lot of persuading people that we should be valued as humans.

B&N: That is a lot to put on a single community. But at least we have True Biz. We have the book now. We’ll have the streaming later, we have CODA, which feels like progress. It does. It feels like some sort of progress.

SN: Baby steps, man.

B&N: It feels like a lot of communities are having to do baby steps all at once. What is next for you besides the streaming? I know your EPing that?

SN: Yeah, I’m working on that. I’m reading nonfiction right now. That’s this second book in this book deal that I sold. And, that is a book that I think right now is kind of a mix or a mash up of memoir, critical theory, history related to Deafness. And it’s kind of in the form of a letter to my son, my son who is a hearing CODA and our son who we are in the process of adopting who is a Deaf boy. So yeah, I hesitate to compare it to books written by geniuses like Minor Feelings, which is a book written by a complete genius, but in terms of like the mix of theory and memoir. I hope that it will approach feeling something like that. And that’s what I’m doing now. Teaching. I’m doing toddlers. That’s what’s going on over here.

B&N: That’s awesome. I cannot wait for the new book. But in the meantime, True Biz is is out now. Sarah Novic. Thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over.

SN: Thanks for having me. It’s been so fun.