What a damn Wednesday we are having (said Jenny every podcast Wednesday until the world ended). If you need a break from World Events, of which there are just way too many frankly, we’ve got an especially excellent podcast for you today. We welcomed Zan Romanoff, author of the new YA novel Grace and the Fever, to the podcast, and talked to her about fandom, teenage girls, and how Christopher Nolan is trolling her personally. We had minor technical difficulties when recording, so occasionally you’ll hear a small echo or tiny delay — apologies! My fault! You can listen to the podcast using the embedded player below, or download the file directly to take with you on the go!
For the spoiler-shy, I am happy to report that we do not spoil Grace and the Fever, which is about a girl who’s obsessed with boy band Fever Dream, and a conspiracy theorist that two of the band members are in luuuuuurv; and then she meets! one of! the band members! It is fantastic, and you can listen to this podcast without fear that you will be spoiled.
Here is Trash Mouse Louis at an Arby’s (in his socks, reports Zan). And here, for those unfamiliar with One Direction, is Zan’s extensive explainer of the One Direction phenomenon, over at One Week One Band.
You can find Zan on Twitter at @zanopticon, and the book, Grace and the Fever, is out now from Random Penguin!
Get at me on Twitter, email the podcast, and friend me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Goodreads, as well as Ashley. Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating! We appreciate it very very much).
Credits
Producer: Captain Hammer
Photo credit: The Illustrious Annalee
Theme song by: Jessie Barbour
Transcripts by: Sharon of Library Hungry
Transcript is available below the cut!
THEME SONG: You don’t judge a book by its cover. Page one’s not a much better view. And shortly you’re gonna discover the middle won’t mollify you. So whether whiskey’s your go-to or you’re like my gin-drinking friend, no matter what you are imbibing, you’ll be better off in the end reading the end.
GIN JENNY: Welcome to the Reading the End bookcast with the demographically similar Jennys. I’m Gin Jenny.
WHISKEY JENNY: I’m Whiskey Jenny.
GIN JENNY: And we are here again to talk to you about books and literary happenings. We have a very special episode today. I recently read Grace and the Fever, which is about a girl called Grace who is in the fandom for a boy band called Fever Dream, and then she meets one of the boys in the band. And I loved it, and I got Whiskey Jenny to read it, too. And today we are delighted to welcome Grace and the Fever author Zan Romanoff. Hi, Zan!
ZAN: Hello. I’m so excited to be here.
GIN JENNY: We’re so delighted to have you.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yes, thank you so much.
GIN JENNY: Well, before we get into the book, we always ask our guests what they are currently reading. So what are you reading, Zan?
ZAN: So I have a problem where, when I have a book coming out, I stop being able to read other people’s books.
GIN JENNY: Aw.
ZAN: It’s really weird. I’m a huge, huge reader, and there’s no other time in my life when I’m not reading. But right before a book comes, it’s just like—I think engaging my critical faculties would allow me to engage my critical faculties about my own work, and that’s too scary, so I just don’t do it. [LAUGHTER] But I just—so my friend Maurene Goo, her book I Believe in a Thing Called Love came out Tuesday of this week, which I’m super excited about. It is sitting next to me right now, and that is the next thing I will pick up.
GIN JENNY: I’ve heard of that. It sounds so wonderful.
ZAN: I’m really excited about it. It’s a premise I would be thrilled about anyway, but as it happens Maureen lives in LA. We live in the same neighborhood. We write together. We actually take boxing classes together.
WHISKEY JENNY: Ooh.
GIN JENNY: Oh, man. Good on y’all.
ZAN: Yeah. I mean, this is a new thing in our lives, but we’re so into it. It’s a book that I’m excited about by a person I’m excited about. It’s a very, very ideal situation, a good reintroduction. Like, oh, books are fun!
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: Yay, books.
GIN JENNY: Whiskey Jenny, what are you reading?
WHISKEY JENNY: I just started rereading The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler, for book club. So that’s been fun.
GIN JENNY: Nice.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah. I literally just started it, and two pages in is when a lady with great gams shows up and comes down a staircase, I think. So I’m excited to see her grand entrance.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: What are you reading, Gin Jenny?
GIN JENNY: I am reading a romance novel called The Thing about Love, by Julie James, which I’ve been telling Whiskey Jenny about because I think she would love it. It’s about these two FBI agents who were archrivals at FBI Academy six years ago, and now they have been put on an undercover job together.
ZAN: Ooh.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, so they have to develop grudging respect.
WHISKEY JENNY: So they have to pretend to be dating?
GIN JENNY: No, they specifically have to not pretend to be dating.
WHISKEY JENNY: Oh.
GIN JENNY: Because they need her to make nice with the guy they’re trying to—
WHISKEY JENNY: Oh, yeah.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, Yeah.
ZAN: So they have to develop grudging respect and also pretend that they hate each other? Because that sounds like a very good dynamic.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: They don’t have to pretend that they hate each other, but they do have to make like they’re not having sex behind the scenes, which they are.
WHISKEY JENNY: Which they totally are.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: Yeah, not to spoil anything for y’all. [LAUGHTER] So we also like to ask all our guests—and Zan, feel free not to have an opinion on this—do you prefer the sea or space?
ZAN: Oh, god. Oh, Lord. Um, the sea. Definitely the sea.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah! Team sea.
[LAUGHTER]ZAN: Definitely the sea. But this is a thing where I’m like, I love the sea. I love the ocean. The ocean is cool. Jumping in the waves is fun. And then I think about the deep ocean and I’m like, I don’t like that at all. So there’s parts of the ocean that I like and parts of it that I’m terrified of, but I’m terrified of all of space.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: I think that’s a great summary. Parts of the ocean are indeed terrifying.
GIN JENNY: That’s about where I’m at, too. I do tend to prefer the ocean, in part because it’s right by us, but we know so little about it.
ZAN: Like, it’s on the planet. It’s right here, and there’s places that we don’t understand at all. And there’s creatures down there we’ve never seen, and we don’t know what they’re doing.
GIN JENNY: Anything could be happening down there. We would have no idea.
ZAN: Right? When I saw Pacific Rim, and the creatures started emerging out of the ocean—obviously, those were interdimensional creatures, but I was like, yeah, seems like the kind of thing the ocean would do.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: Yeah, that fully tracked for me. Also that seemed like the most real thing, and also really played into some of my nightmares.
ZAN: Oh yeah.
GIN JENNY: Well, Zan, before we ask you all our nosy questions, do you want to tell us a little bit about what Grace and the Fever is about?
ZAN: Sure. It’s about a girl who’s obsessed with a boy band. And she’s hanging around her Los Angeles neighborhood one night. And she accidentally meets one of the members of this boy band and gets drawn into his life and discovers that the lives he and his bandmates are living are not the ones that she was imagining were going on behind the scenes.
GIN JENNY: Yeah.
ZAN: A big part of the book is that she’s a big conspiracy theorist, this girl. She believes that two of the band members are in love and are in a relationship. So it’s specifically about her investigating both her own relationship to the band and who they are as people, but also this idea that she knows a secret about them. And it turns out they have many secrets, and she discovers which ones she knew about and which ones she didn’t.
GIN JENNY: What I loved about this book is it’s about the mythologies that we create for other people and the danger of believing in that too hard. And I think it’s really interesting that we see Grace doing this with Fever Dream, but also with her friends in the suburbs, and with her mom, even. And we see them doing it to her. They construct these ideas of who other people are, and then they find that they don’t always align with reality.
I love that you normalized fandom in that way. Because I think, especially with stuff like this, there’s this intense need in the culture to pathologize it. But I loved how you showed it being really intimately connected to the ways we always interact with fellow humans.
ZAN: Precisely. I don’t know if you heard my sharp intake of breath when you said pathologize. [LAUGHTER] Because that’s precisely the word that I always use. I’m like, it’s totally—I love a cultural analysis. I love to navel gaze. I love to talk for hours about, what does this mean? And what’s interesting about it? Whatever. But I think there’s a point past which it becomes pathologizing. And especially when you’re pathologizing young women, and especially their desire—you know, the idea that young women might be interested in sex, it’s like, ooh, I don’t know.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: Right. Stop that in its tracks.
ZAN: Yeah, like, better really investigate that. Doesn’t seem real.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: I think Katy in the book had a line about how everyone wants to pathologize just being human, and I thought that was a really lovely phrase, and that Katy was very wise.
[LAUGHTER]ZAN: Thank you. One of the things that I do in YA that I’m trying to wean myself off of is putting this sort of older, wiser character in who can say things that I really want to say. [LAUGHTER] You know, that I wish that someone had said to me when I was 17. So I put Katy in there to say, hey, you know, you’re really fine.
GIN JENNY: I thought it was nice, and I thought it came at a good place in the book. It wasn’t so early on that Grace wouldn’t have listened, and it wasn’t so close to the end that it felt like the moral that you were putting on the end of the story.
ZAN: Yes, thank you. That’s a good way of thinking about it. I think you walk a very fine line, always, when you’re writing books, and especially because I’m writing books for teenagers and trying to really be aware of what you’re putting in someone’s head at a time when they’re really absorbing a lot of stuff. If you learn something from my books, I want it to be a good thing, but I’m not necessarily in there being like—OK, I obviously try and think a lot about messages I’m sending. But I don’t want to be, like, a moral, where it’s like, what I learned from Grace and the Fever was, one sentence.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: And it’s funny, I think, at least as a kid I was very resistant to that type of thing. But on the other hand, it must be an incredible responsibility, because you never know what thing that you say is going to be the thing that ends up sort of being everything to a person who’s—I think about this all the time with my little nephew. Because he’s too tiny right now to know anything. Once he starts understanding English and I start saying stuff to him, anything I say could really change the course of his life.
ZAN: It’s really—so one of my best friends has a baby who’s just turned a year old. So also, you know, she’s getting some language but she’s not conversational. And there’s this whole thing that’s like, don’t tell little girls they’re cute. Tell them they’re smart, tell them they’re capable, all this stuff. And I’m like, yes, 100%, absolutely. But it’s very hard not to tell a baby she’s cute.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: It is! It’s so hard. I tell my nephew he’s cute at least 12 times a day.
ZAN: And that’s my compromise. I’m like, you’re so cute. And you’re very capable and strong. And you’re SO cute!
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: They’re not exclusive.
ZAN: Exactly. And I’ll tone it down hopefully a little bit when she gets a little older, but right now she’s so cute. God.
GIN JENNY: Aw. Well, you talked about the original idea, or the germ of the idea for this book was about a fan girl becoming a detective, and how that was a story you couldn’t end up writing. What else changed as you were writing the book? And were there things you had to take out that you wish you’d been able to keep in?
ZAN: Oh man, so much changed as I was writing the book. But none of it feels consequential. Like in the first draft Grace had a brother. Speaking of older, wiser characters actually, she had a brother. And then at a certain point I was like, Katy’s doing the things that the brother character would need to do. I’d just written a brother character in my first book.
GIN JENNY: A really sweet one, by the way.
ZAN: Thank you.
WHISKEY JENNY: I love a sweet older brother.
ZAN: Right? I have a younger brother. It’s not as good. [LAUGHTER] I can say that ‘cause he’ll never listen to this.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: I have an older one, so I always fall for the older brothers and get really into them being siblings.
ZAN: This is my fantasy of having an older brother, is that he would, again, that he would have taught me the things I needed to know and I wouldn’t have had to figure them out for myself. [LAUGHTER] But yeah, taking that out. ‘
There was a thing that he allowed me to do. So very early on in the book Grace meets a guy named Max. And originally Max was her brother Jason’s friend. And because Jess is Indian, I wanted to have two characters of color have a conversation on the page about being of color, especially because Grace is white. And that felt like the right way to address race in the book, to talk about being looked at as a celebrity, being looked at as a person of color, being the kind of person who, for whatever reason, when you walk into a room people have their own quite serious set of preconceptions about. Once I took Jason out, I just couldn’t get Max back in the room once Jess was there. It just never made any sense. That was the thing that I ended up doing edits on until we should have been done, and I was still putting it—trying to massage the race stuff and make sure that it felt addressed in a way that made sense, and was sensitive, and justified like having made him a character of color without making it the focus of the book. Because I don’t think anyone needs my extremely white opinions. [LAUGHTER]
So yeah, that was a big thing. I’m trying think of what—oh, originally, and I just think this would have been interesting. There were a couple of different ideas about the romance, and I thought maybe I would write a book where there wasn’t a romance. Which seemed to me—I was like, you know, that’d be cool, to write a book about a girl who meets a boy band and doesn’t fall in love with one of them. But also I was like, hm, I love writing kissing scenes.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: I was going to say!
ZAN: I want to teach young women that interesting things can happen to them that aren’t romance. But the kissing scenes won.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: Well, and it definitely made sense, I thought, from how Grace sees that band. I think it would be unusual if she met them and was totally unaffected. It made sense for her character to me.
ZAN: Yeah, that makes sense. I think she might have been affected, but they might have been like, hey, you know. [LAUGHTER] You’re not the one.
WHISKEY JENNY: OK, well have a good night. We’re going to go.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: I like how that possibility didn’t even cross Whiskey Jenny’s mind. Well of course, now that they’ve met her—
ZAN: They’ve got to fall in love with her.
WHISKEY JENNY: Of course.
ZAN: It was great fun and I have no regrets. But I do, you know, I think about that. Especially how I felt a lot when I was a teenager. You know, the heroine would always fall in love. And I was like, I guess I’m not the heroine of the story. No one’s falling in love with me.
GIN JENNY: Our friend Ashley just said something incredibly similar. And it’s just strange, because when I was a kid I read more than I did almost anything, and that never crossed my mind.
ZAN: But it’s so interesting also, because I think you can write what you believe to be the most feminist, most sensitive story, and someone can read it and be like, hm, it doesn’t do it for me.
GIN JENNY: Yeah.
ZAN: Like I just had a long conversation with my friend Amanda, who’s an investigative reporter, about, we were rewatching Almost Famous.
GIN JENNY: Oh, such a good movie.
ZAN: Such a good movie. And it was really interesting to rewatch it and be like, oh, so many ideas that I have about life [LAUGHTER] came from that.
WHISKEY JENNY: Oh, there they are.
ZAN: Right?
GIN JENNY: That’s one of those movies that any time it comes on cable, I’ll watch it in its entirety.
ZAN: It’s so good. But one of the things, when I watched this movie, I really wanted to be Penny Lane. I was like, I want to be the girl that boys fall in love with write songs about. And Amanda was like, oh, never. She’s like, I knew I wasn’t pretty enough to be a Penny Lane. She’s very beautiful, but she’s like, I knew I wasn’t pretty enough.
GIN JENNY: Aw.
ZAN: And she’s like, but I knew I loved watching William Miller, the Cameron Crowe character, get to be there and ask questions and get to find out whatever he wanted. She’s like, that was one of the big things that made me want to be a journalist, was seeing that movie. And it was interesting that she watched the movie and saw herself in the boy. You know, it was sad that she couldn’t see herself in the girl character but saw herself in the boy character and got a career out of it.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: I’m trying to think. I think I mostly—I mean, this is funny because Billy Crudup’s character is nothing like me at all. But he was the character I was the most interested in. I was like, yeah, he controls what happens to everyone. That’s amazing.
ZAN: So we had this conversation and we were like, there’s two kinds of girls, the Penny Lanes and the William Millers. And we brought it to our friend Gina and she was like, yeah, she’s like, Russell Crowe’s character, obviously. [Editor’s note: She means Billy Crudup!] She’s like, rock star. What’s wrong with you guys? [LAUGHTER] There’s lots of kinds of people. You never know who’s going to identify with who or what in your story.
GIN JENNY: Right. You can’t predict all the reactions. It would be an infinite possibility set.
ZAN: You can’t predict all the reactions, but you sure can drive yourself insane trying to.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: I do still also kind of want to read the fan girl detective novel.
GIN JENNY: I know, I do too. I’ve been trying to think what YA authors are there who would do a good job with that?
ZAN: I don’t know, actually. That’s a good question. I’m trying to think of who I’ve read detective novels from, YA detective. I don’t even know. I’m sure people are writing it, but it’s not where I’m at in the world. I would love to read it.
GIN JENNY: I think it’s got to happen at some point, because I feel like more and more female writers especially are coming up through fandom and are really immersed in that world. It seems inevitable that someone writes this book eventually.
ZAN: I will say here, I will say everywhere, if this sounds interesting to you, please do it. I would love very much if one of the things that happened because Grace is out in the world was that this book existed and I got to read it, since I failed to write it.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: Maybe it could be a Grace and the Fever fanfiction story.
ZAN: I mean, I would love that. No one’s written me any fic yet. But fingers crossed.
GIN JENNY: Would you read it?
ZAN: So in theory creators are not supposed to read fanfiction of their own work, right? But that’s specifically because if you ever want to do anything else in that world then you might be influenced by it. I don’t know. I don’t see myself writing any kind of Grace sequels or follow-ups or spin offs. I mean, I just I wouldn’t be able to stop myself. That’s the real answer to the question.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: I don’t think I would either. I wouldn’t be able to resist.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, I don’t think I would. I always think about this when I see creators talking about how they don’t read the fanfic of their work. I just, I do not see how they could resist.
ZAN: Right? What is that? How? Also I’m like, you say you haven’t, but you’re—
JENNYS: Same.
ZAN: —you’re in Google, ghost mode or whatever.
WHISKEY JENNY: Right.
GIN JENNY: Incognito browsing or whatever it is.
ZAN: Yes, exactly. Incognito browsing. You’re on AO3, don’t lie to me.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: Well so you talked about how you wanted the Katy character, the older brother character, to be able to advise Grace. And when we were reading, Gin Jenny and I talked about a lot how Grace makes a lot of mistakes in this book, and we wanted to reach into the book and be like, no, Grace, stop! Was it hard for you to write those scenes specifically? Are you also trying to stop Grace from what she’s doing but she just does it anyway? Or how do you handle that?
ZAN: It’s really interesting. I gave an early draft of this book to a friend of mine who writes fic, because I really wanted her—I was like, you’re my fandom sensitivity reader. She couldn’t read it. She got like a quarter of the way through and she was like, there’s too much secondhand embarrassment in this for me.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: Oh!
ZAN: I know! I was like, oh. I don’t think that I made it that bad. I mean, the answer is no, honestly. I never have a hard time putting my characters through stuff, in part because I know how it’s going to end. I do think the ending of this book is basically the biggest fantasy that you could get while still remaining some semblance of realism. Listen, it’s coming for you. It’s fine.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: It’ll work out. Yeah.
ZAN: I also care much more about writing an interesting book than I do about making a fictional character have a nice day.
WHISKEY JENNY: And I’m sure the book is the better for it.
ZAN: Yes, yes exactly.
GIN JENNY: When Whiskey Jenny—because she read this book after I did, so she was texting and gchatting me updates as she was reading it. And she is the most radiantly honest and virtuous human in the world.
WHISKEY JENNY: Oh, thank you, stop it.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: So it was particularly stressful for her when Grace was telling lies, and she kept texting me like, why is she telling all these lies, Gin Jenny? And I thought—because I don’t lie very often, but I’m a really good liar. So when I was reading it and thinking about Whiskey Jenny’s reaction, I was thinking, she didn’t lie nearly as much as she could have.
[LAUGHTER]ZAN: I feel the same. Like OK, I don’t feel like she doesn’t lie as much as she could. I understand why she’s lying. I think that’s the thing that makes a difference to me.
GIN JENNY: Yeah.
ZAN: And she understands. She feels bad about the lying she’s doing, but she feels like she has to do it. And also that it gets largely undone by the end. All of the cleverly constructed, it’s like, no it’s not. You’re going to get found out. Yeah, but I guess I feel very sympathetic to those lies also because they’re the kind of lies that I told. You know, when I was younger, I didn’t know how to be the person who I wanted to be, or who I was. And I was sort of—to me it seemed like covering up parts of my personality. In fact it was, you’re just lying. You’re lying about how you spend your time.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: There were definitely places in the book where Grace chose to be honest and I was like, girl, I would have lied so hard right then. [LAUGHTER] I guess it would not have turned out to my benefit.
ZAN: It’s so weird writing books, because you are always setting up problems that you then both have to but also get to solve. And so I gave her lies that I knew I was going to make her tell the truth about later being like, well, lie about it now. You’re not going to have that much fun.
WHISKEY JENNY: Just you wait.
GIN JENNY: You’re going to learn a lesson about this, young lady.
ZAN: Right. But you’re going to learn a lesson just in time [LAUGHTER] for it to be the right amount of pages.
GIN JENNY: So you write a lot about being famous and managing celebrities in this book. What kind of research did you do for that? Because Whiskey Jenny and I enjoyed that a lot.
ZAN: I’m very glad. I enjoyed it, too. I frankly did not do a lot—that’s not true. I grew up in Los Angeles. I grew up—my parents are in the movie business.
GIN JENNY: Oh.
ZAN: They’re both on the crew side. So my dad was a cinematographer and then did equipment rentals for a number of years. My mom did sound, so she was a boom operator. And I just grew up very much—
GIN JENNY: Aware of that.
ZAN: Yeah. To me, Hollywood is a real place. I grew up there, you know, seeing actresses and actors at the grocery store and being like, oh, these people are very real people with very real lives. And so that was helpful. I hear good gossip from friends who work on sets and friends who are in the industry and just from being around. That’s generally helpful. And then I’m a very avid reader of gossip magazines—or gossip websites, I guess. I’m just obsessed. Lainey Gossip I think is so good.
GIN JENNY: Oh, yeah.
ZAN: Because she’s so smart about following the way that celebrities construct narratives. She is always the person I go to when I have questions about why is this thing happening. And she’s always like, oh, this thing is happening because two weeks ago they set this up, and they’re trying to change this guy’s career. So yeah, I feel like I have grown up with the knowledge that there was insider knowledge to have and that people’s lives are often just much more boring than you think they are. [LAUGHTER] So there was that trying to imagine them from the inside. And then also reading just a gazillion gossip websites and being super deep into One Direction Tumblr and having a sense of what stuff looks like from the outside, and then trying to combine those two things.
So people say did you do research and I’m always like, no. Because really it’s like I just figured out a way to parlay the research that is my life into writing a book.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: That’s the way to do it.
ZAN: Yeah, nice work if you can get it. Highly recommend.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: Well, since you brought up One Direction.
ZAN: Yeah. [CHUCKLES]
GIN JENNY: So I know virtually zero things about One Direction. I sort of know which one is which because Whiskey Jenny told me. So I know that Harry is the long-haired one. I know he cut his hair, but I can’t deal with that. It’s too confusing for me. And
ZAN: As an archetype, you’re correct. Yes. Good.
GIN JENNY: Thank you. Zayn is the one who left.
ZAN: Yep.
GIN JENNY: Lou-is or Lou-ie, we weren’t sure.
ZAN: Lou-ie.
GIN JENNY: Lou-ie. Hey, nailed it! Whiskey Jenny, you see that? I was right!
WHISKEY JENNY: You were right, yeah.
GIN JENNY: Louis is Whiskey Jenny’s favorite, and he’s the one from Yorkshire?
ZAN: Doncaster.
GIN JENNY: I’m impressed that you know specifically the town that he’s from.
ZAN: I have a T-shirt that has the birthplace and year of every member of One Direction on it. So it’s like, Doncaster ‘91, Holmes Chapel ‘94. [LAUGHTER] Which is very delightful. It’s very delightful in terms of recognizing other One Direction fans, because only certain people are like, oh, Holmes Chapel.
GIN JENNY: That’s really clever. That’s really smart.
ZAN: It’s an incredibly upsetting reminder that Harry Styles was born in 1994.
GIN JENNY: Yeah.
WHISKEY JENNY: That’s in the ‘90s.
ZAN: Yeah, like, IN the ‘90s.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: Solidly.
[LAUGHTER]ZAN: Yeah. My little brother was born in 1990, so to me that’s the cutoff. I’m just like, 1990 is OK—not like I’m dating his friends. I would never. [LAUGHTER] But real humans were born in 1990. That’s fine. But past that, it just—
GIN JENNY: It’s ridiculous.
ZAN: I’m like, that’s not, no. Not happening. But Louis Tomlinson is also my favorite, like 100% for sure.
GIN JENNY: OK, I was going to ask.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yay!
GIN JENNY: What’s so good about Louis, you guys? Why do you like him so much?
ZAN: He’s a Capricorn and I’m a Capricorn. [LAUGHTER] Sorry, but it’s true. He’s just like—my favorite photograph of Louis Tomlinson is of him after a show. One Direction has played some sold out stadium concert to hundreds of thousands of fans. Louis Tomlinson goes to an Arby’s, wanders in in his socks. It’s just like getting some Arby’s. You know, just trying to live a normal life. My friends and I call him the trash mouse, because he’s very small and has these delicate features, and he just looks like he lives in a trash can and I love him. [LAUGHTER] So that’s my answer. Whiskey Jenny, what’s yours?
WHISKEY JENNY: Mine’s not nearly as good. I think my first real introduction to One Direction was the Carpool Karaoke that they did.
ZAN: Sure.
WHISKEY JENNY: And he was just really cute and charming on that. And I love a Yorkshire accent, and I just thought he was cute and made funny jokes. [LAUGHTER] I was like, yup, that one. [LAUGHTER] Because obviously you have to pick one. You can’t not pick one.
ZAN: Oh, you 100% have to pick one and you made the correct choice. So good job.
GIN JENNY: Good work. I haven’t picked anyone yet. I just know that Liam is the worst one.
ZAN: Liam’s not bad. Liam’s just kind of nondescript.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: Yeah. Yeah! When Whiskey Jenny was telling me the salient detail about each of the One Directioners, she said “Liam is—question mark.” And then she said, “Poor Liam.”
[LAUGHTER]ZAN: It’s very true, though. I do feel—I mean, whatever. Liam’s fine.
GIN JENNY: I was going to say, yeah, he’s going to make it.
ZAN: Yeah, right? Liam’s totally going to make it. He’s all good. I’ve just read a quote from some interview where they were talking about the hiatus and he was like, “Initially I thought hiatus was some kind of religious order. I thought we were going to have to become monks.”
WHISKEY JENNY: Oh! Oh, Liam.
GIN JENNY: Oh, honey.
ZAN: You’re just always like, oh, Liam.
GIN JENNY: Bless his heart.
ZAN: Bless his baby heart. He’s really— [LAUGHTER] I love him so much, but here’s a doofus. [LAUGHTER] Sorry, did you have a question that wasn’t just me talking about how much I love—oh, wait, sorry, also we’ve got to shout out Niall, because I do love Niall.
GIN JENNY: So Niall is the one that Whiskey Jenny describes as the Irish baby.
ZAN: He is an Irish baby and I love him.
GIN JENNY: Is it correct that he has new solo work out, as does Harry Styles? So Zayn released an album
ZAN: Questionable whether you want to count him as a member of One Direction, but he did.
GIN JENNY: Ooh, shade.
ZAN: Well, he left the band! They continued to be One Direction without him for quite some time. I have no problem with Zayn, but he wants to distance himself from it, I’m like, fine. Anyway, Zayn has an album out. Harry has an album out. Niall has a couple of singles. Louis has a single with Steve Aoki. Liam just released his first single. So yes, they’re all—Solo Direction is in full swing.
GIN JENNY: So who do you think is best on their own?
ZAN: [EXHALE] Whoa boy.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: If this is too loaded a question, feel free not to answer.
ZAN: No, I mean, it’s funny. For a really long time people would say which one is your favorite, and that was a question I couldn’t answer, because I was just like, they’re all my favorite. And then it was like, no, I can rank. [LAUGHTER] I mean, OK. I think Harry is doing the most interesting things with his solo career. I think Harry is the most distinct artist. I think Harry’s going to have a longest solo career. There are things on his album I really love. I think he’s just doing the best job at imagining a full scale solo career for himself.
I don’t know, that said, there’s parts of this album that I’m not super in love with. I like dumb pop music. That’s why I like One Direction. [LAUGHTER] His whole artsy, ‘70s rock star thing, it’s great, and there really are songs on that album I love, but—everyone hates Liam’s single, but I kind of love it. I just jam to it.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: What is his single called? I haven’t heard it. I’ll have to look it up.
ZAN: It’s called “Strip That Down.”
WHISKEY JENNY: Ooh. Nice.
ZAN: It’s a sexy little—it’s very Justin Timberlake. It’s like a very good 2005 Justin Timberlake song, and I’m fine with that.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: No, I love those, yeah. I was actually just about to ask you if you thought Harry Styles was the frontrunner to be the Justin Timberlake of the group. But now I’m thrown into confusion.
ZAN: Right, well, in terms of having a successful solo career and being the one that people can name out of the group, 100,000%, Harry Styles, no question. Zayn gets the benefit of having left the band early. I think people do know who Zayn is. But again, I think Harry is just so much savvier about positioning himself as an artist and making himself into an event in a way that the rest of the boys kind of aren’t. But yeah, in terms of musical stylings, Liam is apparently going to be following in Justin Timberlake’s footsteps.
[LAUGHTER]I mean, look, I hope they all Timberlake. I hope they all are successful. I love all of my children, not quite equally, but almost.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: Are you excited to see Dunkirk?
ZAN: No.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: Wait, you don’t want to watch Harry Styles die horribly on a beach?
ZAN: A, I don’t want to watch Harry Styles die horribly on a beach. But B, I don’t want to watch like a two and a half hour silent World War II film.
GIN JENNY: Wait, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s silent?
ZAN: It’s not entirely silent. But it’s apparently mostly silent.
GIN JENNY: Euch.
WHISKEY JENNY: This is new information. I did not know that.
GIN JENNY: I also did not know. That sounds terrible. I would get so bored. I’m not—I really enjoy a plot that moves along and good dialogue.
ZAN: Right? I write young adult novels. I listen to pop music. I’m happy to—if it’s artsy and it’s good, I’m happy to indulge in it. But this just seems to me like self-indulgent artsy nonsense. I really feel like Christopher Nolan is trolling me personally. He’s like, there’s literally nothing I can do in this movie that you won’t go to see it, because you’re going to go see Harry Styles. I’m like, you’re right Nolan, grr! [LAUGHTER] So am I excited? No. Am I going to see it opening night? Absolutely. Wearing my One Direction shirt.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: I was going to try and find a smooth way to work this into the conversation, but I don’t think that I have. But since we’re talking about dialogue, one of the things I really liked about the book—this is really specific—but I thought your deployment of the word “like” as conversational filler was so on point in every case.
ZAN: Thank you.
GIN JENNY: I feel like it evoked the way people actually talk without overdoing it, because I definitely say “like” more than I would like to read it in dialogue.
ZAN: This is like the third, maybe, podcast interview that I’ve done, and every time I do one and then have to listen to it again, I’m like, oh boy. [LAUGHTER] It’s really, here’s some verbal tics. It’s fun.
GIN JENNY: You should try editing a podcast. Then your verbal tics really—you can see them in blue color on the screen.
ZAN: Ooh. Yeah, no.
GIN JENNY: It’s rough. Like this noise—tsk, tsk. That noise. I make that all the time and then I have to edit it out. And now every time I see it, I am filled with rage at myself. Like, just stop doing that annoying noise.
ZAN: And you can’t, because you can’t both concentrate on having a conversation and also rearranging your speech patterns. It’s just not possible.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: I can’t, but then it feels like there are some people who don’t use it. And I’m just in awe. How do they do it?
ZAN: Beats the hell out of me. I’m excited for you to report back on what the worst—my most annoying one is.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, I’m definitely going to email and let you know about that.
[LAUGHTER]ZAN: Thanks for being on the podcast. Surprise. [LAUGHTER] But, to answer your actual question, two things. One of which is that my editor had to aggressively edit. Originally the dialogue was so naturalistic as to be mildly unreadable. [LAUGHTER] And so my editor did a fantastic job. Super credit to her. Because she’s like, I totally get what you’re going for here and I’m not trying to take everything out, but I just want to make sure that the sense of what you say is not getting lost. But even still, in—I think maybe the starred review that the book got, their one complaint, they were like, there’s way too many “likes” in this book.
GIN JENNY: Oh, disagree.
ZAN: So I especially appreciate the compliment, and also I was like, you really should have seen the original manuscript. You would have flipped out.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: Well, compliments then to both you and your editor, because I think you found the right balance.
ZAN: Thank you. My editor is a true gem. I mean, she’s a fantastic person, but she’s also the right person for me to work with. She always gets what I’m trying to do and is very good at being like, OK, totally great. Let’s just figure out how to tune this so it will work for people who are not you.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: Well, while we’re talking about the writing process, I was just wondering, did you have any other options for Fever Dream’s band name?
ZAN: It’s funny, I’m sitting pretty much directly in my bedroom where I was sitting when I came up with it. Which I know because I was like, OK, I’m going to write this book about a boy band. First order of business, got to name the boy band. [LAUGHTER] This is before the writing, right? I’m like, got to up with some names first. Can’t start writing right away.
So I looked over, I was looking around my room for inspiration, and I had Megan Abbott’s The Fever.
GIN JENNY: Oh, yeah.
ZAN: It’s a book about—remember a couple of years—or a number of years ago now, a bunch of girls in rural—the rural east coast somewhere.
GIN JENNY: Yeah I thought it was Pennsylvania, maybe?
ZAN: Yeah, Pennsylvania—were having these unexplainable fits. People were like, maybe it’s Tourette’s, but maybe it’s environmentally caused, but maybe it’s just hysteria. Anyway, it’s a book about—a novelization of that. And I was like, yeah, fever is a very good metaphor for like— [LAUGHTER]
GIN JENNY: Right, right.
ZAN: And I just borrowed her metaphor and never gave it back. I really wish I had a better story for it, but that’s the honest to god truth.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: No, I like it. I like that you started with that, because I agree, it’s very important. Names are important.
ZAN: Yes. And especially for this, I do feel like—I learned the hard way in my first book that once I choose a name at the beginning, it’s very hard at the end to go back and change it. Because at that point the character just has that name to me, or the place has that name, or whatever it is. So with this one, I was like, OK, I know at the beginning now, I’ve got to be a little more strategic when I choose names. Because in the first book the main character’s name is Lorelei, and it’s evocative to the point of being kind of a spoiler.
[LAUGHTER]GIN JENNY: I was actually going to ask about A Song to Take the World Apart, because in both your books you wrote about the way music sucks people into new worlds. This one deals with music fandom, and not to spoil anything but A Song to Take the World Apart is about a girl who finds out she’s a literal siren. So my question is, is The Little Mermaid your favorite Disney movie?
[LAUGHTER]ZAN: Probably. If I thought about it, probably. I’m not a super Disney movie person.
GIN JENNY: OK.
ZAN: Not that I don’t like—you know, I just haven’t watched one in quite some number of years.
GIN JENNY: I do not recommend revisiting The Lion King as your parents age.
ZAN: Ooh, yeah, no. That sounds extremely traumatic.
GIN JENNY: Yeah. I’m done with The Lion King forever. I have decided.
ZAN: Yeah, no, I think that’s correct. Now that you say this, I officially am also done with The Lion King. [LAUGHTER] But I will say that growing up, my two favorite movies—as a tween and a teen, my two favorite movies were Almost Famous and High Fidelity. So.
GIN JENNY: Aw.
ZAN: Yeah, very long term fan of stories about music. And I do think that for me, when I was a teen and a tween, going to shows was my gateway to imagining a different life for myself, just different than being a kid.
GIN JENNY: Yeah.
ZAN: You know, I’d grown up hanging out with my parents, reading books, watching TV, hanging out with my friends, going to the mall. And going to see shows on Sunset Boulevard in LA, which is a lot of what Song is about—like, going to the Whiskey and the Roxy. You know, I was 14 and my parents would drop me off, and I would get to go to this club by myself, where there were adults. And just the whole thing seemed beyond magical to me. And I was like, this is— [LAUGHTER] In a very real way it was my first portal into having a grown up life that, you know, my parents didn’t know anything—I mean, they dropped me off and picked me up, but weren’t in the room for.
GIN JENNY: It was just something that belonged to you before it belonged to them.
ZAN: Yeah, exactly. And I was hearing bands they’d never heard, and in lots of cases never heard of.
GIN JENNY: You were a Hanson fan originally, right? I mean, that was where you started lurking in music fandom online?
ZAN: Oh, yes. I am, as I say, sitting in my bedroom directly under a Hanson poster. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, no, I have tickets to see them. They’re doing their 25th anniversary world tour in the fall.
GIN JENNY: Yeah, my friend is also going.
WHISKEY JENNY: Oh my gosh, 25th?
ZAN: 25th. They’ve been a band for 25 years. “Mmm Bop” is 20 years old.
WHISKEY JENNY: Holy crap.
ZAN: Yeah. That’s true, actually. I forgot about that. Even before I was going to shows, just discovering Hanson and being on the internet, reading fanfiction, that was my first imagining of teenage life, that I would meet a boy in a band and be his girlfriend. Did not happen. Spoiler alert.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: Well, I just wanted to ask you if you think there’s something unique about boy band fandom even in the world of fandom? I couldn’t think of anything else, like you’re a fan of specific movie characters or TV characters or actors, there’s just something very specific about being a boy band fan that’s different from the other kinds of fandom, and I wondered, as a fandom expert—[LAUGHTER] that I just made you.
ZAN: Oof. I was going to say.
[LAUGHTER]WHISKEY JENNY: —if you agree, or think no, it’s just exactly the same as all the others.
ZAN: I mean, it’s hard for me to say, because I’ve spent so much more time in boy band fandom than I have in any other kind of fandom. But I do think there’s something really specific and lovely about it in that it’s made for girls. And sometimes not in really great ways. You know, sometimes it’s made for girls because corporations are trying to sell things to girls. And that’s not—it’s great that things are being made for girls, but it’s with a cynical corporate profit motive in mind.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah.
ZAN: But then beyond that, it’s girls taking a thing made for girls in order to be sold to them and saying, OK, I’ll buy it, but here’s what I’m going to do with it. Even the things that you are specifically marketing to me to be for my demographic, I’m going to create my own version of it. I don’t know, yeah, I feel like there is a particular youth to boy band fandom, because people often get into it a little bit younger. You know, you can check out any time but you can never leave. [LAUGHTER] As my own life is teaching me every day.
The boy band fandom is in a lot of ways specifically about the moment between girlhood and womanhood and allows fans to explore and celebrate that, I think, in a way that not a lot of things do. Again, I respect everyone else’s participation in their fandoms, but mine is my favorite.
GIN JENNY: That’s a really lovely answer.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah, that’s really beautiful. I don’t have a question, but I just wanted to compliment you. I really enjoyed the treatment of fan girls in this book, and though that you were just really gentle and sweet about them and what they want, and why they do the things that they do. Even if they’re bugging Grace or Jes or whatever and making their lives harder, I was really impressed at how you were always able to be so sensitive to them. I’ve never read anything like that, so thanks.
ZAN: No, thank you, first of all. It’s always really cool to get the compliments on the stuff in the book that was really important to you. And that was one of the things that was really, really important to me. I think being a fan is such a weird, tenuous thing. It feels so exposed to be like, here’s the thing I love. Yeah, it’s so tenuous in the first place, and then to have people mocking fandom is just so rough and so unnecessary. I’m like, look, by all means have conversations about the things about fandom that are not fantastic. Again, let’s talk about it. But—
GIN JENNY: People seem to really love talking down the things that girls and women are excited about.
ZAN: Exactly. There’s plenty of stuff making fun of fandom or pointing out what a problem is or whatever. It’s OK, again, you come back to, like, don’t pathologize this. This is an extremely normal part of being alive, and in fact it’s really lovely.
You know, it makes me sad on my own behalf that for so long the thing that made me happy also embarrassed me. A big thing that I hope this book can offer people is that if fandom is something that makes them happy, and if they are embarrassed by it, it will help them be less embarrassed.
WHISKEY JENNY: If anything could make Harry Styles my favorite and not Louis, it was his recent quote about how, don’t crap on teenage girls for what they like.
ZAN: Right? Oh, so good.
WHISKEY JENNY: So good.
[LAUGHTER]ZAN: I legitimately teared up a little bit, which is so funny. [LAUGHTER] Because OK, first of all, he’s not the first person to say that. Also, he should friggin’ say that. It’s not like he’s really doing us a favor. But lots of people should say that and don’t.
WHISKEY JENNY: And don’t! Yeah.
ZAN: And the fact that he knew to say it. I thought the quote he gave in particular was really great. Like, it’s very clear, he’s like, “that’s sick.” [LAUGHTER]
WHISKEY JENNY: Right, you can hear him saying it.
ZAN: Yes, it was a totally regurgitated soundbite. But also, it was a real moment of being made aware of how unappreciated slash at times disliked I feel by the culture that I love, you know, that somebody just being like yeah, it’s cool that these people like this, made me tear up. It was like, wow, we have a long way to go.
GIN JENNY: Seriously. Well, Zan, before we let you go, we always love talking to people about the things they love. So can you tell us some of your favorite authors, people whose work influenced you or has been really important to you?
ZAN: Yeah. So my favorite writer is Joan Didion, which is the California girl cliche. [LAUGHTER] But I love her, and speaking of—her and Francesca Lia Block are two of my favorite, favorite authors. And I think you see Francesca Lia Block much more clearly in my books.
GIN JENNY: I was just going to say, I can absolutely see the lineage from Francesca Lia Block.
ZAN: But I remember reading both of them and, again, having grown up in Los Angeles and seeing so much media about it, TV shows set here, and reading books or whatever, and reading people writing about it, and I was like, you’re getting it wrong. What are you talking about? [LAUGHTER] You know, that’s not what the city is like at all. And so reading them both times was really revolutionary in terms of, oh, you can write your own version of the city, and it can be good, and it can be right. And this stuff is out there and other people have responded to it. So yeah, I love them really a lot.
And then the third in the triumvirate of LA writers who I just discovered, and I can’t believe it, is Eve Babitz. Who was also a novelist and essayist, sort of contemporaneous with Didion, and fell out of fashion for a while and now is getting a resurgence. People keep republishing her books, re-issuing her books, which is amazing, because they’re so good. She’s just so funny and smart. So yeah, I would say Eve Babitz Joan Didion, Francesca Lia Block.
GIN JENNY: Those are three good answers, I think. I hadn’t heard of Eve Babitz I’ll have to look her up.
ZAN: Oh yeah, I super highly recommend her. Slow Days, Fast Company is the essay collection that I’m particularly obsessed with.
GIN JENNY: OK. I’ll get it at my library. I’m sure they have it.
ZAN: If they don’t, tell them to order it. Yeah, those are my three.
GIN JENNY: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for talking to us. This was really a treat.
WHISKEY JENNY: Thank you so much.
GIN JENNY: And we really love the book. I thought it was great. I’m excited for whatever you’re going to do next.
ZAN: Thank you so much. Thank you for reading it. Thank you for talking to me. And thank you for putting up with the slight technical difficulties.
GIN JENNY: No, you’re—[LAUGHTER]
WHISKEY JENNY: No, it’s great.
GIN JENNY: Well, Whiskey Jenny, do you want to tell me what we’re reading for next time?
WHISKEY JENNY: I do. We are reading Miss Pym Disposes, by Josephine Tey, who is a classic mystery writer, I suppose. And in this one a psychologist goes to a campus and maybe uncovers a murder!
GIN JENNY: Gasp!
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah.
GIN JENNY: Have you read anything by Josephine Tey before?
WHISKEY JENNY: I have, and I really enjoyed them. I read The Daughter of Time, which was her Richard III repositioning mystery novel. And I think I’ve read a couple others, but I can’t remember which ones. Oh, there’s one creepy one—Brat Farrar is about someone who comes back into a family’s life pretending to be the long lost person or something.
GIN JENNY: Yup, I haven’t read it, but I own it, and that sounds like the correct premise.
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah.
GIN JENNY: Well, this one should be good. I love the murder mystery, and I haven’t read one for kind of a while, so.
WHISKEY JENNY: Hooray!
GIN JENNY: Hooray!
WHISKEY JENNY: Have you ever read Josephine Tey?
GIN JENNY: Yeah. But just The Daughter of Time.
WHISKEY JENNY: OK. What did you think?
GIN JENNY: I loved it!
WHISKEY JENNY: Yeah, it’s cool, right?
GIN JENNY: Yeah.
WHISKEY JENNY: This has been the Reading the End bookcast with the demographically similar Jennys and special guest Zan Romanoff. You can find her on Twitter @zanopticon. You can find us on Twitter @readingtheend. You can visit the blog at readingtheend.com. We’re both on Goodreads as Whiskey Jenny and Gin Jenny. And you can email us—and we hope you will, we love hearing from listeners—at readingtheend@gmail.com. And if you’re listening to us on iTunes, please leave us a review.
Until next time, a quote from the glorious Grace and the Fever, by Zan Romanoff, which is available in bookstores now. “There’s something about seeing him in the flesh—with no cameras and no stage and no paparazzi, not even his bandmates around—that makes him seem oddly compact, like gravity is working harder on him than everything else in the world.”
[GLASSES CLINK]THEME SONG: You don’t judge a book by its cover. Page one’s not a much better view. And shortly you’re gonna discover the middle won’t mollify you. So whether whiskey’s your go-to or you’re like my gin-drinking friend, no matter what you are imbibing, you’ll be better off in the end reading the end.