Episode 18: Gayle Forman
On Judy Blume, Taylor Swift, and the Innate Goodness of Young People
Gayle Forman’s Five Books:
Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself by Judy Blume
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Not Nothing by Gayle Forman
Other Books Mentioned:
Mamaleh Knows Best: What Jewish Mothers Do to Raise Successful, Creative, Empathetic, Independent Children by Marjorie Ingall
The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy by Anand Giridharadas
Doppelganger by Naomi Klein
North Woods by Daniel Mason
Playground by Richard Powers
Getting to Sorry by Marjorie Ingall and Susan McCarthy
To say Alex has had it rough is an understatement. His father's gone, his mother is struggling with mental health issues, and he's now living with an aunt and uncle who are less than excited to have him. Almost everyone treats him as though he doesn't matter at all, like he's nothing. So when a kid at school actually tells him he's nothing, Alex snaps, and gets violent. Fortunately, his social worker pulls some strings and gets him a job at a nursing home for the summer rather than being sent to juvie. There, he meets Josey, the 107-year-old Holocaust survivor who stopped bothering to talk years ago. And when Alex and Josey form an unlikely bond, with Josey confiding in him, Alex starts to believe he can make a difference--a good difference--in the world. If he can truly feel he matters, Alex may be able to finally rise to the occasion of his own life.
Gayle Forman has written several bestselling novels, including those in the Just One Day series, Where She Went, and the #1 New York Times bestseller If I Stay, which has been translated into more than forty languages and was adapted into a major motion picture starring Chloe Grace Moretz. Her first middle grade novel, Frankie & Bug, was a New York Times best children’s book of the year.
In our conversation, we’ll discuss the link between anxiety and creativity, Judaism's instructions for living with loss, and how all of us are capable of rising to the occasion of our lives.
The Five Books is a podcast that celebrates the role of books in Jewish culture. Through author interviews, we delve into Jewish identity and discover each author’s favorite novels. Join us every week for new Jewish book recommendations! Some of our episodes have included conversations with Yehuda Kurtzer (host of Identity/Crisis), Yael Van Der Wouden (author of The Safekeep), and Dara Horn (author of People Love Dead Jews.)
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Hosted by Tali Rosenblatt Cohen
Produced by Odelia Rubin
Editorial and website support by Sarah Waring
Artwork by Dena Friedman
Music by Dov Rosenblatt and Blue Dot Sessions.
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Transcript: Gayle Forman on Judy Blume, Taylor Swift, and the Innate Goodness of Young People
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen:
Welcome to The Five Books where each week we talk with a Jewish author about five books that are near and dear to them. My name is Tali Rosenblatt Cohen and today I'll be talking with Gayle Forman about her new middle-grade novel for readers of every age called Not Nothing.You mentioned just when we were talking that this was your favorite book, so I need to ask you.
Gayle Forman:
Shhh. Don't tell anybody.It’ll be our little secret. Yeah. So I need to ask you why.
I don't know why. It took me seven years to write. I wrote it the wrong way so many times, but I really just think that it probably is the best representation of my heart and my soul of any book I've ever written.
Gayle Forman has written several best-selling novels, including those in the Just One Day series, Where She Went and the number one New York Times bestseller, If I Stay, which has been translated into more than 40 languages and was adapted into a major motion picture starring Chloe Grace Moretz. Her most recent book, Afterlife, was Good Morning America's second YA book club pick. All that and Not Nothing is my youngest daughter's favorite book of all the ones we've read together before bedtime.
I got to sit down with Gayle in the studio where we discussed why she chose to tell a story partly set during the Holocaust and about rising to the occasion of our lives.
I really, the idea really came to me after the Charlottesville white supremacist march where I was like, oh, here we are again, this is happening, huh? And, you know, I was less sort of surprised. Like, I knew this stuff has always been in the shadows and it had been kind of given allowance to come out. But it was more like, what draws somebody to that? And what draws somebody away from that?
We also talk about Judy Blume, the importance of experiencing big things through books, and how she reconnected with Judaism as an adult.
One of my favorite holidays is Yom Kippur, which sounds weird, but that we have this time that is for a moral reckoning, and it is for recognizing that you are never going to cross that chasm between the person you are and the person you want to be, but you can try, you can make it your life's work to get there, and some years you get closer than others. To me, that's just, it's just a recipe for growth and connection and humility and love and wonder, and those are the things that just bring me joy.
All that and more coming up next.
I am so happy to have you here. Welcome to The Five Books, Gayle.
Thank you. Good to be here, Tali.
Thank you. As I told you, I read Not Nothing with my youngest daughter. We read it one chapter at a time at bedtime every night, “can we please read one more page, one more page?” I emailed you before we had even finished reading the book, and then we finished the book. We were both in tears. We stayed up late talking about the characters and why they made the decisions they made, and then they're waiting for me. When I finished that night was an email from you saying you were going to be here. So this is really wonderful to have you.
It's beshert, as we might say.
It is beshert, exactly. I mean, I think the best children's books are really just books that are also accessible to children. And this book was that. It dealt with so many big questions about second chances and forgiveness and what it means to rise to the occasion of your life.
So I think it's a book that everyone really will enjoy, and especially reading intergenerationally was such a profound experience for me. And I hope lots of other people find that. So thank you for writing it.
Well, thank you for saying all of that. It means a lot to me. And I really, really hoped that they would be an intergenerational read, and particularly a much older generation, a much younger generation, because I think it can sometimes be hard to cross that chasm and recognize that people are people are people are people, but they are, no matter when they're born.
Yeah. So can you tell us, for those who haven't read it, a quick synopsis of the book?
Okay. My very crass comp is that it's The Princess Bride meets Schindler's List.
Oh my gosh.
You know, I know that's been done before. It's about a 12-year-old boy named Alex who has done something truly bad. Like, I don't want to downplay this. And as a result, he's arrested. He's awaiting a hearing at the end of the summer to decide what's going to happen. And a sympathetic social worker sort of arranges for him to volunteer at an old age home where Alex, who is angry and resentful and also deep down very scared, does not want to be. Particularly when he gets there and there's all the old people and they freak him out. And then there's another young volunteer named Maya Jade who bosses him around and he's miserable until he winds up in the room of Josey, who is 107 years old and he's a Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor. He's also the narrator of this story. Josey is at Shady Glen kind of just waiting to die and he stopped talking.
But when the boy shows up in his room for reasons neither one of them initially understand, he begins to talk to Alex and he begins to tell Alex the story of Olka. And then we sort of shift into two stories and two times where he's telling the story about Olka, who is a young woman who worked for his family store in Krakow, Poland, and who initially when they meet, she's kind of bitter and angry and says something bigoted and almost gets fired. But he doesn't fire her. Instead, he asks her to teach him to sew. And the two of them sort of both grow. And she goes from being a small and bitter person to being his good friend.
And then they fall in love and are going to get married and the war breaks out. And she winds up sort of first helping him and his family and then helping so many families. So it's really ultimately about Alex, this boy who has not had very many occasions to be his better self in his life, hearing about Olka and being inspired to kind of become his better self and rise to the occasion of his life.
There's so much I want to ask you about. You mentioned just when we were talking that this was your favorite book. So I need to ask you.
Shhh. Don't tell anybody.
It’ll be our little secret. Yeah. So I need to ask you why.
I don't know why. It took me seven years to write. I wrote it the wrong way so many times. But I really just think it comes down to Josey and Alex and the spirit of the book, which allows for us to make mistakes, really big mistakes, and not be stunted by them, not be judged solely for them, to have to take responsibility for them, but to not let that be an obstacle. I think we're living in an era where there are so many invitations to be our worst selves, and where it feels like if you get something wrong, like it is just so fraught and everything is over, and I think that shuts people's down, it shuts off their curiosity and their compassion.
So I loved spending time with these characters. I loved being in an old age home. I've volunteered in old age homes since I was in my 20s, and it's just a space that I really love. I really love Josey and Maya Jade and Alex, and I just think that it probably is the best representation of, like, my heart and my soul of any book I've ever written.
It's such a beautiful heart and soul, so I'm glad you shared it with us.
Book One: a Jewish Book from Childhood — Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself by Judy Blume.
It was hard to pick things out of the Judy canon, right? She so effortlessly weaves in Judaism in a way that I didn't realize how privileged I was when I was younger to sort of see that, just kind of like the way Judaism was lived in my life. But this particular book is a historical novel.
It's at post-war and Sally and her family have to go down to Miami for six months because her brother has nephritis, which back in those days, was just — the whole thing just I thought was fascinating. And it's sort of post-war and sort of Sally plays like these sort of Holocaust games with her friends that get her — people are like, what is going on?
She has this huge active imagination, and there's somebody there who they think is a Nazi. And just, I think I really identified with Sally because she had this huge overactive imagination that sometimes got her into trouble. And I loved that book and I reread it as an adult and loved it anew and sort of realized how much of that there was post-war and even during the war. The old movies from those time were all about sort of secret Nazi spies being everywhere. So I thought that was great.
And that book also gave me a lifelong fear of man o’ wars. She gets stung by, or somebody, I don't even remember it's been so long, just stinging by a man o’ war. And that put the fear of God into me. I grew up on the West Coast, but we do not have jellyfish in our very cold seas, or at least we didn't used to. And I just remember there's things that stand out from those books.
But I just, I loved Sally's inventiveness. I sort of loved the post-war of it all, where I was just kind of woven into the family story as it has been for, I think, generations of Jews who had family in Europe. And that was such a big part of the background. But that it wasn't the focal point either. And I loved that it managed to do it with humor, even though I didn't sort of recognize as I was reading it, all the various reasons why sort of humor has been such a part of sort of Jewish creativity.
Yeah. And what was your Jewish life like as a kid?
I grew up in Southern California in sort of a pretty reform household. But I went, I was sent to a Jewish day school that was pretty conservative. And it wasn't really, I think, because of any religious belief. But they were starting busing in LA. And my parents were really down for busing. They were really pro-integration until they found out that they couldn't even guarantee that we would stay at the same school for an entire year. So they don't want me moved mid-year.
So they sent me to this school where, you know, I spent like half the day learning sort of Torah Hebrew and half the day studying English. So I didn't love the school, not because of the sort of Judaic content, but it was just a small school and there was a lot of mean girls and I was a weird girl. And it was like really nowhere to hide. So those were some rough years for me. So I think that would have been probably when I was reading Sally J. Freedman and seeing this other sort of weird imaginative girl sort of in an area where she did have friends and she was accepted.
And did you know when you were a kid that you wanted to write?
Oh, God, no. I mean, I always wrote, but I had no idea. Like, it's not like now where you have just such access to seeing authors and seeing it as a life, you know, like a job. My dad was a CPA. My mom was a speech pathologist. You know, we had a, you know, my father's family in particular is one of seven poor kids. And sort of nobody went into the creative field, at least in his generation because that's not what you did.
So, I just didn't sort of see it, but I always loved to write and I was sort of encouraged to do it. I just never, ever considered it as a career until, you know, I sort of accidentally went to college and accidentally was pre-med for about a year. I was like, not for me. I took random classes. And then I wound up falling in love with journalism. But even when I was a journalist, I never thought I would become a novelist. So, it's all snuck up on me.
Well, one thing I just want to... Judy Blume says on her website, you know, this is her most autobiographical novel. And she said that she was “curious, imaginative, a worrier. I was always making up stories in my head.”
Describes me to a T.
Yeah, that's what it sounds like. She said, “the character of Sally explains how and even why I became a writer.”
Yeah, you can see that. And so maybe that was interesting that I identified so much with that character. That describes me and I become a writer. And when I talk to kids about writing, we talk about what creates a story for me. I always describe it as a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. And that the peanut butter is the what if scenario. And I think everybody has what if scenarios. But I think writers have a lot of overactive what if scenarios, a little bit of neuroses there. And you can see sort of where the Jews come in with that as well. That worrying, it's sort of like following the rabbit trial of these various scenarios, what would happen. And then the chocolate is when the character arrives to kind of like tell the story. So that really does make sense to me.
And you were writing for Seventeen, right?
Yes. So yeah, I traveled for a couple of years after high school. And then I decided I was going to be a doctor. And that didn't pan out. And so then I was a journalist. And I wanted to work for Sassy Magazine. Do you remember Sassy?
Sure.
RIP Sassy. And by the time I finished, Sassy had died. And so I went to Seventeen and I worked there for many years. And it's funny because I write children's literature. But when I wrote my first young adult novel, it was such an aha moment because I had wanted to work for Sassy. I had been drawn to Sassy. And then I was at Seventeen and I loved writing for Seventeen. And I think I've always, so clearly, had always been drawn to writing for and about young people and recognized early on how capable they were.
Because when I worked at Seventeen, we did these articles. They sent me to Sierra Leone to cover the Civil War. And I would go to Pakistan and talk about Afghan girls who were fleeing for an education or migrant teen farm workers here in the US. And people would be like, I can't believe teenagers are into that. But they were so into that. It was amazing to me how the concern for, like, seeing the rights of other young people transcended borders. They used to send dollar bills in envelopes into Seventeen when we would write articles like that. So early on, I knew not to discount this readership that they are capable of, pardon using my own phrase, but capable of rising to the occasion if we invite them to.
Yeah. And I mean, I think that's what you and Judy Blume, I think share that sensibility of, like, talking directly. It's like you have direct access into young people's brains.
I'm just going to savor the “you and Judy Blume” of it all for a minute.
Absolutely. And I think you both don't talk down to your readers. What do you think it is about your character or personality that enables you to relate to young people the way you do?
You know, that's such a good question. I've been thinking about that a lot lately because we have just been seeing just the book bans and the terrible sort of challenges to just kids and reading. And I think about that, and I think that there's some very pernicious forces that are very cynical in this fight.
And I also think there's parents who are just very worried about their kids and think that exposing them to any kind of difficulty in a book means that they will experience that difficulty in life, which, P.S. they're going to experience difficulty in life, but that's not, and it's not protective. But I have been thinking about that, of like, when do we all forget what it is like to be a teenager? Because again, back to the people are people are people. We've all been this age, and we have all experienced the things that we felt when we were this young. And I don't understand sort of where that hardening is.
And I sort of made a joke that there's like a day that when you're like in your thirties, they like hand out a little amnesia pill, and I must have, like, been sick that day. Because I never forgot what it was like to be a teenager. And I discount this idea that as you get older, you feel less than you do when you're younger. You maybe have to be a little bit more regulated in how you express it. But I think that's a dangerous idea that you feel less, because then when you feel more, you stuff it down, you have shame over that. And that's when kind of bad things tend to happen. So for whatever reason, it didn't happen to me. And I think maybe it's because my career began in my mid-20s, and I was immediately exposed to young people, and I've never stopped that exposure. So maybe that's what did it.
Lucky for us. I read somewhere that some study of Taylor Swift's fans—
Raising hand. Yeah. Huge Swiftie here.
That the girls who are Taylor Swift fans do better in school or something. There's like something that's interesting there about, you know, owning your feelings.
I love, because she's, I think Taylor Swift is a genius. I'm a huge fan of hers. I love the music, but as a storyteller, I'm blown away at how she can tell a whole novel's worth of story in a song lyric. And if you look at what stories do, and we know that stories build empathy and they build resilience, that there's something to be said about this sort of creative spark and the empathy and also the resilience. I think when you can go through an emotional rollercoaster sort of in the passenger seat, be it through a song, be it through a book, it's both cathartic and regulating, but also it allows you to kind of test out those experiences secondhand before you have to face them firsthand.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's what draws readers to your books. You know, all your books are like —
Are you — first Judy Blume and now Taylor Swift? I'm just going to, like, die now.
They're so high stakes. You know, they really allow readers to experience those like big, huge life, death, living with loss, grief, all of the big things that I think kids are really interested in.
And everything feels so high stakes at that age because it's often your first time encountering it. I think when we talk about what I'm reading now, we talk about like how I'm looking for things that lower the stakes or put the stakes into a different perspective. But when you're young, you know, that immediacy that this has never happened to you before. And you don't know how you're ever going to get through this because you don't have a history of having gone through it and weathered it.
Book Two: a Jewish Book from Adulthood — The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon.
I'm going to have to preface this one by saying I have not read it in many, many years, but as I was contemplating which of the books to sort of pull out, this one kind of won, and it's partially because I was just, over the February break, out in Los Angeles with my kids, and we went to the Motion Picture Academy Museum, where they have an exhibition — because they left this out of the permanent exhibition — about the Jewish founders of Hollywood. And it really kind of got me thinking a lot about creativity and Judaism.
Tell me more.
Well, just that so many of those founders of the Hollywood system, literally like all of the big studio founders, they either had had to leave because of the war or had relatives who were in the war. If not the war, the pogroms, all the reasons to be expelled from places. And that because there were such strict social strata in New York and all the quotas and what have you, they really could not get a foothold here because of discrimination.
And so they kind of went out west. And this is where the film industry was not even just starting. They invented it, right? They helped to build it. And just this idea, this hustle that you have to do because you're constantly kind of on the run, but also we're so used to having to like pick up stakes and go somewhere else. I just was really blown away. And when I was thinking about Kavalier and Clay, I read this book in 2002 and I read it twice. My husband and I traveled around the world for a year, that year. And it was like right after 9/11.
And so, good books. And this is also just before e-books and what have you. And so we were always at the mercy of where we could find new books. And randomly like in Zanzibar, I was able to pick up a bunch of Philip Roth books. So you just never knew.
But I remember particularly reading the scenes of them creating the comic book. And it reminded me more recently of reading Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. And just seeing that kind of spark of creativity on page is just so incredibly satisfying to me. And there was just so much to that book.
It's just epic and the way the war plays into it and sort of Jewish mysticism with the golem, and a kind of innate tolerance of sort of homosexuality. So all of that kind of played in together. And so as I was visiting that exhibition, I was thinking about that. And I was thinking, what was the first book that really hit me with that? And it was that book.
I guess I'm wondering the connection between creativity and Judaism. Obviously, you talked about sort of being ready to flee. I don't know, do you think there's something else there?
I mean, I think there's lots of things. Another book that almost made the cut is Marjorie Ingall's Mamaleh Knows Best. Have you read that one?
I have.
It's wonderful. And it really looks at why, there's like so many Jewish Nobel Prize winning, et cetera and so forth. And it has a lot to do, you know, she talks about sort of the way Jewish moms parent, obviously, this is a parenting book. So I think there's just so many different threads that come into it. And it's interesting because we talk about how, like, I didn't see any of that in my life. But then when I started to when I was older and learned about the relatives in Germany, there were a lot of artists back then. And it's just that a lot of that side of the family died out or lost a generation or two or three. And I think that there's just, I don't know, I've been very interested lately in epigenetics, right?
Because I'm anxious, my mom is anxious, my sister is anxious, my niece, my daughter, like I'm sorry if I'm outing anybody here. But just like a heightened level of anxiety that just came pre-programmed. And the epigenetics of it all explains, it's because we have just had to flee and flee and flee, not just the Holocaust but sort of everything, just constantly kicked out of one place or another.
So I think about that and I think about that little nervous engine, which is such a part of the creative force. And I think about using the humor of it all to make sense of something that is senseless as sort of a part of it. And I think maybe that is sort of part of the reason sort of ties up into all of this. You're looking for meaning in place where you really can't find meaning. So it sort of got me thinking about all of that. And I also have this idea that because we have just been constantly kicked out from place to place to place to place, like the people who survived, I must come from scrappy, scrappy lines, right? It's almost like miraculous that any of us are here. So I just like look at that scrappy, scrappy line of us, that sort of hustle. And it's the creative, creativity, but it's also the hustle because anybody can be creative, right? There's lots of people who I'm sure are much better writers than I will ever be. But what they don't have is the ability to sort of sit down and hustle and get that book out into the world.
Yeah. You talk in your author's note for Not Nothing about your grandparents having left Germany. So I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about them.
Yeah, there's a funny story about my grandparents leaving Germany is that the story we always told as a family is that they got out just in time because they got out and they left in September of 1938 from Berlin and Kristallnacht was like six weeks later. And, you know, I just kind of never thought, obviously like so many people who fled Hitler, they got to the United States and they wrapped themselves in that American flag. And they didn't want to talk about that. They were just so, so grateful to be Americans. And that's sort of another thing I also love about books like Kavalier and Clay is just the immigrant experience is just so woven into America’s story and so woven into the Jewish story. And I think it gives perhaps Jews a unique take on what's happening in the world now.
But my grandparents got here in 38, 39. And so for years I thought, oh, we didn't talk about it. And then when I started to really learn about what had happened in sort of Berlin and Nazi Germany from 33 to 38, I thought, oh my God, how terrifying. And that moment of like, when do you decide to leave and you're the frog in the pot? Like, when do you know? And it never kind of occurred to me until sort of things started to get a little dicier in our country.
And then I'm like, oh, when, when do you know that you're sliding to fascism? When do you know that it's time to upstakes? Not so easy. You think about that, like, oh, why didn't they leave? Because it's, who wants to like leave their community and their home and their business? So that really sort of got me thinking a lot about that. And I, I really wish that my grandparents had lived long enough for me to have more of an inquiry, not just about life in Nazi Germany, but life before Nazi Germany. You know, what were their aspirations? How did that change when they got here?
So, because I did not have that opportunity with them, and my grandparents on my dad's side all died by the time I was 16. That's why I started sort of volunteering and meeting old people at old age homes, including a woman named Olka, who also obviously plays into this. And I visited her on the Upper West Side for years. And she was Hungarian and had survived because of Raoul Wallenberg. And I didn't know anything about Raoul Wallenberg. And I thought, I'm a Jewish girl from a Jewish family. How come I don't know about this? And that sort of led me down the rabbit hole of just all the sort of sung and unsung heroes of the resistance, which I don't think you necessarily hear about. And that sort of played into the character of Olka.
Book Three: A Book That Changed Your Worldview — The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt.
I’ve just been on a Jonathan Haidt kick. So I started with The Anxious Generation, and then I basically read everything else that he has written and co-written. And I think they're all incredibly helpful. The Anxious Generation is incredibly helpful for understanding the world we're in right now, not just in terms of, look, like what is happening to young people, but just how millennia, millions of years of evolutionary adaptation, not just like human, but mammalian of using play to learn our world has just been upended, and helps to frame the world that we're in right now.
But The Righteous Mind, I really liked, and it's sort of one of a trio of books that I read. So there was that, The Persuaders, and I read Naomi Klein's Doppelganger. And all of those are really about how we form decisions, and how we can find compromise among people who we differ from. And the sort of thesis of The Righteous Mind is that decisions are gut and emotional first, and then we create a rationale afterwards. So that when we go about trying to talk to somebody about something we don't agree with them on, say like vaccines, when you start trotting out all of the different statistics and this and that and studies, it doesn't work, because that's not where the decision has been made. The decision has been made somewhere sort of in the heart and in the gut, and you have to get at that.
And I think we have so just dug in having these sort of shouting matches of like, you know, conflicting facts and set aside the idea that there really shouldn't be conflicting facts. There can be conflicting interpretation of facts, but it's still just not a winning way to kind of get anywhere. And so it's been sort of helpful in understanding, oh, right. It's like it's, it goes back to like reading as kids. It's all emotional, but it's not supposed to be emotional. So we say it's rational, but really it's emotional. And that really has impacted my way of looking at what's going on right now, so that I can, like, A, understand it with more compassion, B, not always assume that I'm right, because my decisions are made just as emotionally as anybody else's. It's just kind of helped me move forward when I'm trying to engage with people who I disagree with and who disagree with me.
And part of what he does in the book is he's visiting different cultures and communities and different places around the world where people are making decisions based on their own principles that are guiding their morality. And I know travel has played a big role in your life as well. So I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit about travel and how that's impacted you.
Absolutely. I would say it's been one of the biggest impacts of my life. I was an exchange student when I was sixteen and I lived in England. I wanted to go to England because all my favorite bands were from London, and then I wound up in this tiny village with 500 people in the Midlands. And after that, it just ignited my love of traveling, but it was also just so interesting to go someplace where the United States was not the center of everything. And to understand that people were both very different and very the same.
And, you know, the British reserve back in the 80s was real. And so from that, I came back from that year and told my parents in an English accent that I had actually not faked, but when you live somewhere for a while, you're as suggestible as I am. I came back and I said to them, I shall not be attending college. I am going to the University of Life. And so I got a job senior year and I saved my money. And I wound up, like, traveling around Europe and living in Amsterdam on off for a couple of years.
And again, that love of travel is what led me to want to become a journalist, where I began to travel further afield and discovered like two things: that people are people are people are people, like everybody just like wants their family to be okay. And that there's very different ways of looking at the world and I don't have a lock on it, nobody does. So I think that that was real great training for being a novelist, both the being a journalist in terms of, like, learning to write and transcribing the interviews to learn dialogue, but also the recognition that like my way is not the only way or necessarily the right way. And trying to find sort of a common, common kernel with people who outwardly would seem so different from us.
So you spent a few years traveling and then you started college. Was that obvious to you that you were going to come back and start college?
No. I mean, I sort of did a lot of little detours. I thought I would become a flight attendant and then I thought I would go to school in the Netherlands where I had been working and I was applying to the Universiteit van Amsterdam and realized I didn't really want to go to school yet. And then kind of came back and forth. And then finally it was just like, all right, I should go to school. Like, I don't want other people to be in charge of me. I'm going to have to go to school, which is funny because people are always in charge of you. And then I just randomly went to the University of Oregon because I had such a late application deadline. It was too late for the UCs when I got back.
And so I went up there and it's just like, again, for things happening for a reason. I met my husband there and I also studied journalism there. And they have an amazing journalism school. So nothing seemed obvious. In retrospect, it all seems obvious. Like when journalism became the thing, I'm like, of course. Travel plus writing plus talking to people about things that are none of my business. Three of my favorite things.
Amazing. This book deals a lot with the individual versus the group and how do you make decisions that accommodate for an individual versus the group? And I think that's what kids are dealing with in a daily basis, in a way that maybe adults don't give them credit for or aren't fully aware of how much they're juggling there. I wanted to ask you what you think adults miss about kids and morality.
That they do kind of have an innate sense of goodness and morality when they sort of come into this world. And, you know, maybe part of that needs to sort of get taken out. But think of how sensitive kids are. Like when they see a wrong in the world, those kids sending their dollar allowances to Seventeen, kids sort of crying when they're hearing about an animal that's being mistreated. And I'm not sure sort of where that goes. And we have definitely, it seems like we've always been a pretty individualist country, but it feels like it's even more so now. Sort of every person out for themself or every family out for themself. So it's funny because the lessons that we teach kids in kindergarten feel very contrary to the lessons the culture teaches us as adults. I mean, you're taught to share, to share with a big group, to cooperate with a big group.
I think about how hard that is for kids to share a toy. I imagine like as an adult, someone coming over and being like, I'd like to use your car. And you could say, no, thank you. I prefer not to. And they'd say, no, no, you have to share. It's so funny. It is funny. We have this collective spirit because of, I don't know, because of the way they're educated or what have you. And then it doesn't really continue on. In other cultures it does, but not in ours.
Until they read your books.
Book Four: The Book You're Reading Now, Orbital by Samantha Harvey.
I'm reading Samantha Harvey's Orbital now and I'm going very slow because it's just, it requires that kind of book. And it reminds me of, like, books that I've been reading lately, including North Country and then Playground. But all of these books have been both devastating and incredibly comforting because they remind me of the ephemerality of all of us.
A couple of years ago, my daughter and I were traveling in Dubrovnik and there was a, somebody had scribbled into the wall, Memento Mori. And apparently the sort of story went that it was a construction person, like from the 1500s, I don't know. And it was his, he was mad at the kids who were hassling him. So he was like, remember death. But my daughter and I just started saying that to each other, Memento Mori.
Like it helps to kind of frame everything that's going on as both incredibly important because this is our only life that we are given. And also like, it's just so brief. So I think those books, you know, Orbital, literally you're like looking at Earth from, from space and seeing sort of the passage of time and life and death and the beauty of the planet. And those other books have really just kind of helped give me a grounding in this moment where everything just feels so existentially terrible in some ways that I just think that I could completely melt down. And so it gives me sort of a little bit of distance and perspective.
Grief has played a really large role in many of your books. And I think you write so beautifully about living with loss. So I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about that and what you've learned about living with loss.
Living with loss is life, right? We have to learn to live with loss. Because otherwise we spend our whole life doing crazy things to try and protect from it, which we can't do, or trying to estrange ourselves from it, which does not great things to us. And I just think that it's the price of admission for being here. And the sooner we can tell that to young people, the better.
Like, this is this idea, I saw somewhere somebody talking about my other book, Afterlife, and saying it needed a content warning because of grief. And I thought, no, grief does not need a content warning. A content warning or a trigger warning, I understand that. If it's like a traumatic event that none of us should have to go through, but somebody did, and we don't want to have to relive that. But grief is not a traumatic event that we all have to go through. I mean, it can be traumatic, but it is just a cycle. It is a part of life.
And the finality of death in our culture does not make it any easier. My sister is a hospice nurse, so I think that plays into how we approach death as this enemy that must be defeated even though nowhere in history has anybody won that game. And how when people die, it's just devastating. And obviously, it is devastating, particularly in some situations where people's time has been cut short, when you lose a child, things that are unimaginable. But even more devastating when you lose that person entirely because you just put them behind this, like, giant wall and assume you'll never see them again or you'll see them again after you die.
And I always joke that like Judaism, I love it because we're so much more focused on this life than the afterlife. I appreciate the impetus and the reason to be a moral human is not for some heavenly reward, but because it's the way to be and you'll get that reward here. But it just means you're less prepared when things like that happen. And then realizing that there's ways to keep people alive.
And of course, Judaism does prepare you for that because what's the thing that we say when someone dies?
May your memory be a blessing.
Exactly. It's instructions. It's literally instructions. Like, here's how you survive that loss. You keep that person alive. You talk about them all the time. You keep them part of your daily life. You think about them. You talk to them. And it's so comforting. It is so comforting if you have that. And when you deny yourself that, it's terrible. And so I just, I really want to, you know, reorient people onto not being so scared of the inevitable things that are going to happen and be more prepared for them.
So now we've just got to talk about your most recent book, Afterlife, right? That feels like what that book is really about. And I loved that the book was a lot about their Christian faith in the family, and then your afterword was about Judaism.
My friend's like, your afterword is a drash. I know.
I was just going to say it was like a rabbinic explanation of, may your memory be for a blessing.
Yeah.
So thank you for sharing that with us.
Book Five: The Author's Latest Book — Not Nothing by Gayle Forman.
Many of your books have had Jewish characters, talk about Jewish things. Do you consider this a Jewish book?
I would say it is my most Jewish book, with the exception of an audiobook that was just on Audible that's called The End of My Heart. But this is even more Jewish than that. And obviously, because it has Jewish characters and Jewish themes and sort of the casual Jewish diversity that I've woven through other books, but more because Josey represents to me what is to me the best part of Judaism and the part that I so relate to and resonates with me.
Which is?
His sense of humor, his sense of wonder, his big heart, his ability to contemplate that he was wrong about something, the way he treats this boy. It just all to me felt like I really wanted to have Josey narrate this book. And one of the reasons it took so long to write is I thought, oh, I can't do a children's book with a 107 year old narrator. So I wrote it as an adult book, and it worked way less successfully. And so once I realized I could do it as a children's book, and with Josey, that's when I wrote this book.
But it was always essential because he had this historical perspective that most people today don't have, and he had a philosophical perspective. And I wanted him to be able to channel Alex. So most of the time when you're reading the book, he's talking about Alex. And it sounds like Alex. It sounds like Maya Jade. But occasionally, he gets to pull back and drop some wisdom.
And there was just something about the way he saw the world that I thought, okay, you can see the world is this hideous, ugly place, which we have seen plenty of evidence for, and also this beautiful place full of incredible people and love and the ability to hold those conflicting ideas in your head and your hands at the same time, to me, feels very Jewish.
Yeah, you talked in your description of the book that Alex, the 12-year-old, has done something terrible, and the reader doesn't know what it is until nearly the end of the story. And the idea in Judaism of teshuva, of repentance, that, you know, you can repair and return and make your way back, that was to me the most Jewish thread of the book, was that element. And I mean, the other big piece of the book is this idea of rising to the occasion of your life.
I usually don't get so Jewy, but I recently...
Get Jewy with me.
Get Jewy. I love it. I recently came across this idea from Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, may his memory be a blessing, where he says that the idea of repentance is like the answer to God asking Adam and Eve in the garden, where are you, ayekah? And standing up like, here I am, is that answer. And so I just... This idea of rising to the occasion of your life, maybe you could just tell us a little bit about that and where that spark came from into this book.
I think... I don't know, I think it's not disconnected with the idea of forgiveness either, because what brings us down a wrong road, a lot of things, right? And I think we all have the ability to be our better selves and our worse selves. And it's almost just like what gets beckoned out. I really... The idea really came to me after the Charlottesville White Supremacist March where I was like, oh, here we are again. This is happening, huh? And, you know, it was a sort of surprise. Like, I knew this stuff has always been in the shadows, and it had been kind of given allowance to come out. But it was more like, what draws somebody to that? And what draws somebody away from that?
And when I originally did the book as an adult book, the character of Alex was a young woman who had really been kind of drawn into that world. And I really looked at reasons why women were. And a lot of it was just like to have a sense of belonging, you know, and to feel a part of something bigger than you. And then I look around the world now, and there are so few opportunities, I feel, for people to necessarily like join up something easily that will make you feel like you're part of a collective and doing something for the greater good.
We've lost, you know, a lot of that both in like the faith-based world or in the unions, which were like the secular churches. And so it just really got me thinking, like what happens when somebody is not, you know, invited to be their better self? And we see that with Alex, who has had a really rough life. Like, you know, he's got every reason for his resentments. And then for Olka, who was the same. And what happens when somebody just says, hey, you know, I'm going to invite you to your better self, inadvertently in both cases. And how that leads to different feelings and feelings of connection with other people, which I think is just the most important thing in the world.
Yeah. There's a character, Maya Jade, Alex's friend, also a 12-year-old, and she's a Jewish character.
The Jewish, Chinese adopted Jewish of lesbian moms. So really like the most Jewish character I could create in a way.
I love that you got all of it in there. I love that you let Frankie and Bug from your previous book have these wonderful grown up lives. Tell me about Maya Jade. Is she someone you relate to as a character?
The funny thing about Maya Jade is how she came into being. It was like in reverse, which I guess is a theme of my career. But one of the things that you sometimes do as an author when you're trying to, like, raise money for your school PTA or for this or that is you auction off naming rights in a book. And those can, like, get like, you know, good couple hundred thousand dollars. And usually when you win the naming rights, it's for a minor character because names are so important. I'm not going to, like, give a name that doesn't fit.
But this particular winner wanted Maya Jade and that immediately clicked this character into my head even before I started this book. And so I just kind of, like, worked backwards from it. And I knew, you know, I know plenty of Chinese adoptees in Jewish families. My younger daughter is an adoptee from Ethiopia. So I definitely wanted to have that representation just sort of casually woven in, as well as, you know, like, you know, same-sex marriage also like so not a big deal.
And also one of the moms having cancer, also not a big deal. I just wanted to normalize a lot of this. Mom has breast cancer. It's like stage 1B. She's going to be fine. Speaking of things that, like, we get very scared about. So Maya Jade just kind of like popped into head immediately. And so when I went back and wrote this as a middle grade, one of the reasons it works so much better as a middle grade is that the social worker is who he is and Maya Jade. So she just represents, like, a lot of kids that I know.
I love that. And I mean, Josey's story is obviously a wartime story. It does, like, tread lightly into his Holocaust experience. Was that something… Did you want to write something set during the Holocaust? Was this something that again you got to from a backwards perspective?
I did not want to write a Holocaust book. You know, I think there's so... It's interesting, because we've obviously talked about it a lot here, because it is such an essential part of like Jewish identity now. But I think when it becomes the only part of Jewish identity, then the entire identity is victimhood. But it's shocking to me that that history is just already being forgotten. So I wanted that history to be retold just so young people would have that perspective.
So to that degree, I wanted to sort of tell the story. But of course, once it went out into the educator world, where there is schools that are doing a Holocaust curriculum, I realized, okay, this is a different way in that is sort of also age appropriate for younger readers, where it doesn't shy away from anything, but it also is not sort of graphic in your face.
For my daughter, I think it served kind of like a gateway drug. After we finished, she was like, I want to learn more about the Holocaust. Can we read some more Holocaust novels?
Number the Stars.
Yeah. Have that on our shelves next. Yeah.
And I know that you've said that this book you wrote and then was sitting on your hard drive for a while, and you went back to it, and then it was published last year. What do you make of the timing of it coming out? And how does it feel to be publishing this very Jewish book in this current climate?
I mean, on one hand, I'm like, there's never been a better time for a book about rising to the occasion and the important of connection and recognizing this history. And at other time, like, it was, it was tricky, like I was uninvited from some school visits because of, like, controversial, I'm making air quotes you can't see, “controversial content” and it kind of breaks my heart. If I go back to Jewishness as the ability to hold conflicting ideas in your head at the same time, it breaks my heart how we have seen that fall by the wayside. I'm not surprised why, we live in a binary world that likes a binary. So it feels both important, but also just like it feels like anything remotely, tangentially related to what's going on in the Middle East right now is a third rail. So, yeah, a little bit of both.
Yeah, I mean, that's so interesting. Your book has absolutely nothing to do with the Middle East.
It does not. But again, I think people are scared that they will be accused of something. And then, you know, plenty of authors who are Muslim or Arab, whose books have nothing to do with this either, have seen their school visits canceled. Just everybody wants to stay away from this and it's terrible, I think, because the conversation has been so framed. Obviously, it's incredibly fraught and horrific, what is going on on all the sides. But social media has framed it in such a way of like right and wrong sides. If you're even picking sides, I'm like, can't we all just be against dead babies as a just matter of course?
Empathy is not finite.
Right. So it’s been, I think everybody just wants to kind of steer clear. And it's been a real disservice to young people who don't really necessarily have the understanding and there's been such fear about being able to have this conversation because it immediately went to just the polarization that seems to define everything right now.
Yeah, it's pretty heartbreaking.
I agree.
To take us back to maybe a more optimistic note, so many of your books have these threads of different characters, different characters' perspectives, people finding each other when they need them at the right time, and then they're woven together in these brilliant and beautiful ways. I'm just curious if that's been your experience, finding the right people at the right time.
Yes, and sometimes you don't realize it at the time, and that's not to say I haven't found a lot of wrong people, too. But it just — doesn't always work as neatly as it does in my book, because life is not always as narratively interesting as novels are. But yeah, I mean, looking back to Uli, who I went and visited, and she was just sort of like, I needed a grandma figure, and how she wound up —I didn't even realize, I didn't even put it together. I'd written a whole draft of a book with a woman named Olka, and Uli was short for Ulka. And it's like, oh, look what you did.
So I just think that life is full of this, and I think it is always the case. It's just whether you are attentive to it. I have a series, it's sort of like my most romantic series called Just One Day and Just One Year, and it's about these characters who meet each other and spend a day together, and it kind of changes both their lives and lots of travel. But one of the characters describes these as accidents, right? That like the accidents of fate or what have you. And his whole thing is like, they happen all the time, you just have to have your eyes open to them.
I love that. Well I think that the fact that Not Nothing came out right now is not an accident. I just wanted to ask you, what do you find most meaningful about Jewishness or Jewish identity right now?
I mean, the connectivity of it all. I, you know, for many years, and I think probably because I did not love the Jewish day school or the temple we went to when I was growing up, like I moved away from Judaism. After I had my bat mitzvah, I told my parents, I'm like, I'm done, I'm done.
And then I kind of came back to it on my own terms. A friend of mine who was not Jewish wanted to have a seder, but she's like, I don't think I can host a seder with no Jews. I'm like, yeah, do it at our place. And it was like this four hour raucous thing where you just found so much meaning in this sort of ancient rituals and texts. And so I loved that. I loved that anew it is, you know, there's something to see in anew every single time. You don't get to excuse yourself from sort of what is happening in the world. You don't get to harden your heart. And it's been hard to see hardening of hearts on all sides.
So I think, but whenever I do one of those rituals and recognize like people all over the world are doing them, people have been doing them for thousands of years, I just feel connected to something sort of deeper. And then the rituals themselves, which I just so really, really cherish. The fact that like one of my favorite holidays is Yom Kippur, which sounds weird, but that we have this time that is for a moral reckoning.
And it is for like recognizing that you are never gonna cross that chasm between the person you are and the person you want to be. But you can try, you can make it your life's work to get there. And some years you get closer than others. To me, that's just, it's just a recipe for growth and connection and humility and love and wonder. And those are the things that just bring me joy.
That's beautiful. And so much of what your books are about. So thank you so much for joining us today. This was really wonderful, a lot of fun. And I hope everybody reads Not Nothing and all of the other books too.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you.
I enjoyed myself.
Thank you so much for joining us today for The Five Books. Our guest today was Gayle Forman, discussing her new novel, Not Nothing. You can find a link to the book and all the others Gayle discussed in our show notes.
If you enjoyed our show, please be sure to subscribe and share with friends and family and rate and review in Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. Rating and reviewing really does help new listeners find our show. You can also now find us online at www.fivebookspod.org.
You can email us feedback or author recommendations at team @fivebookspod.org. You can find us on Instagram @fivebookspod or on Facebook, The Five Books Podcast. I'm Tali Rosenblatt Cohen.
Our producer is Odelia Rubin. Editorial and website support from Sarah Waring, music by Dov Rosenblatt and Blue Dot Sessions, art by Dena Friedman. Thanks especially to the Jewish Book Council.
