Episode 21: Jill Santopolo
On Being a “Pizza Bagel”, and Fiction as a Way to Make History More Human
Jill Santopolo’s Five Books:
Exodus by Leon Uris
Acts of Faith by Erich Segal
Uncomfortable Conversations with a Jew by Emmanuel Acho and Noa Tishby
The Stolen Queen by Fiona Davis
The Love We Found by Jill Santopolo
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.
The long-awaited follow-up to the Reese’s Book Club pick and New York Times bestselling global phenomenon The Light We Lost: a thrilling love story about the roles fate and choice play in shaping a life.
It’s been nearly ten years since Gabe’s been gone when Lucy finds a tiny piece of paper in a box of his old photos. An address in Rome. Why did Gabe keep it, and what was he doing in Italy? Lucy buys a last-minute ticket. Impulsive, but Gabe always brought that out in her. Lucy’s journey to uncover Gabe’s secret leads her to Dr. Dax Amstrong, a New Yorker in Italy working with an NGO. His broad shoulders and sad, intense eyes draw Lucy in. His touch reaches her in a forgotten place—one that no one has neared since Gabe.
Jill Santopolo is the internationally best-selling author of Stars in an Italian Sky, Everything After, More Than Words, and The Light We Lost, which was a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick and has been optioned for film. Her books have been translated into more than 35 languages and have been named to the New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Apple, and Indie Bound bestseller lists. She is also the publisher of Philomel, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group, where she edits many critically-acclaimed, award-winning, and best-selling books. She lives in Washington, DC and New York with her husband and daughter.
In our conversation, we’ll discuss how experiencing 9/11 as a college student at Columbia encouraged her to follow her passions, the lifelong gift of introducing children to literature, and how she reconnected with Judaism after her daughter was born.
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Transcript: Jill Santopolo On Being a “Pizza Bagel”, and Fiction as a Way to Make History More Human
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 Jill Santopolo about her new novel, The Love We Found.Jill Santopolo:
Initially, I was not planning to write a sequel to The Light We Lost. One of my very first readers was my sister, Allie, and after she had read the manuscript, she said to me, hey, before you go, could you just let me know what happens next? I said, well, it's a story, it ended. Like, that's where it ends. And she looked at me for a second and she was like, I call BS. You made up that story so you can make up what happens next. So just sit down and make it up and then you can go home.Jill Santopolo is the internationally bestselling author of Stars in an Italian Sky, Everything After, More Than Words, and The Light We Lost, which was a Reese Witherspoon book club pick and has been optioned for film. Her books have been translated into more than 35 languages and have been named to the New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Apple, and indie-bound bestseller lists. She's also the publisher of Philamel, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group, where she edits many critically acclaimed award-winning and bestselling books. She lives in Washington, D.C. and New York with her husband and daughter.
In this episode, we talk about how reading Exodus by Leon Yuris brought her a deeper understanding of Israel.
I had learned facts about the founding of Israel in Hebrew school, but I had never really felt it in the way that fiction can make you feel it. What it really took to restart a nation like 2,000 years after its demise.
We'll also discuss how Jill found the voice for The Light We Lost.
I started writing that way for The Light We Lost because I had gone through a breakup and I kept thinking like, oh, I have to tell him about this. He would really love this. I wonder what he would think about this. And I wanted to sort of capture that feeling of being so connected to someone that they have infiltrated your inner monologue.
All that and more coming up next.
Welcome to the Five Books, Jill!
Thank you so much, thank you for having me.
Thank you for being here. You have written a number of books, many books for adults, books for children, books for young adults. Your books have connected with readers in such a remarkable way and an unusual way. And I think you just write with so much clarity and compassion about the ways that our choices, especially in terms of love and identity, really shape who we become. And the fact that your books connect with audiences the way that they do, I think is really a testament to how relatable and how insightfully drawn your characters are. You know, just full of truths about relationships and timing and the paths that we do or don't take. So I wanted to ask you about this. You just published The Love We Found, which is the sequel to, I think, which was your first book that you published for adults, The Light We Lost. And what was it that made you think that you needed to write a sequel or did you always know that there was a sequel there?
That's a great question. And first, thank you so much for your really kind words about my writing. It's just always, always so meaningful to hear that from people who have read stories because I feel like I set out to write books essentially so people would feel less alone in their decisions and in their sorrows and in their grief. And when I hear that my books have touched someone, it just, it means really a lot to me. So thank you for that to start with.
And as far as The Love We Found, so initially I was not planning to write a sequel to The Light We Lost. The Light We Lost was its own, to me, its own complete story and it had a beginning and a middle and an end and I was happy with it. But I had a feeling starting from very early on that readers might be interested in a sequel because one of my very first readers was my sister, Ali. And after she had read the manuscript, I went over to babysit her daughter who at the time was three years old or two years old, she was little. And when Ali came home, she said to me, hey, before you go, could you just let me know what happens next? And I said, what do mean what happens next? And she said, well, with that manuscript you gave me, the one about Lucy and Gabe, like what happens next? And I said, nothing. She was like, what do you mean nothing? I said, well, it's a story. It ended. Like that's where it ends.
She looked at me for a second and she was like, I call BS. You made up that story so you can make up what happens next. So just sit down and make it up and then you can go home. So I made up a few facts for her at that point. And that was sort of the first time I was like, huh, people might want to know what happens next. Like I left this at such a cliffhanger-y moment that there may be questions. And then over the years, I kept getting a lot of DMs and a lot of emails and people coming up to me at book signings or saying like, I just need to know like what happens with Lucy's marriage. I need to know what happens with her son or I just, could you just tell me she got back to New York and then what happens. So I sort of saved in my head like all of the questions, the list that everyone kept asking me. And at some point I brought it up a couple of times with my editor and at one point she was like, okay, I think this is the time I think you should write the sequel.
I went through and for the first draft, I essentially just like it was a report on Lucy. I, like, answered the questions that everybody had asked me because I figured if I was writing the sequel, I wanted it to be the sequel that answered the questions people had. I didn't want people to leave the sequel and be like, I still have no idea what went on. So that was sort of my first draft was like, here's all the answers and now let me actually make this into a story. And that's sort of how the sequel was born. It's essentially thanks to my sister and a lot of readers who wrote in wanting more.
It's great to know that we all can impact what happens next in the lives of the characters we love.
Book One: A Jewish Book from Childhood — Exodus by Leon Uris.
So I am what my sisters and I refer to as a pizza bagel. So my mom's family is Jewish, mainly from Belarus and Austria. And my dad's family is Italian and Irish. So I'm very much a mix, but Jewish religion is matrilineal. So my sisters and I, we always say, are Jewish enough to marry anyone.
And we all were raised in a reform synagogue. We all had bat mitzvahs and celebrating all of the holidays. And I found that it was really meaningful to me to sort of read about a lot of the history of Jewish people and not only learn about it in Hebrew school, but also learn about it through stories that were fictional or based on fact but actually fabricated so that all of the details that you might want to know were there. And I had, when I was probably in like fourth and fifth grade, an entire shelf of my bookcase was essentially Jewish historical fiction, like everything from All-of-a-kind Family, Lydia Queen of Palestine, When Hitler stole Pink Rabbit, Number the Stars. Truly, it was a full collection for me. And I was realizing recently, I still have a historical fiction section of my bookshelf that is a lot of World War II and surrounding stories.
Even when I wrote Stars in an Italian Sky, which is based a lot on the Italian part of my heritage, and also my husband is half Italian and half Jewish too. We got a whole bunch of pizza bagels in our family. I knew that when I wanted to set it right after World War II, I needed to have the story of Jewish Italians as well in there. So it's been something that I have read about and thought about since I was in fourth grade.
Yeah, that's quite young to have a directed interest in your Jewish roots. And I love some of those books you mentioned and also recognize that it was pretty limited of a bookshelf at that time, just the books that were available to Jewish kids. There's so much of a broader bookshelf now, I think that's —
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah. So tell me when you read Exodus.
So I read Exodus, I want to say in ninth grade. I think I first had read actually Mila 18 because I was really into Holocaust literature at that point. And then I was looking at what else Leon Uris had written because I thought that was a really interesting story, which is, the uprising of the Warsaw ghetto is in Mila 18. So I saw that he had also written Exodus. I had not realized at that point in time that Exodus was this like seminal novel about the creation of Israel. I just thought like, I liked Mila 18, I'm going to also read Exodus. And when I read it, I had learned facts about the founding of Israel in Hebrew school, but I had never really felt it in the way that fiction can make you feel it. I came away from that book with just so much more of a connection to Israel and a desire to visit it. And I feel like it really kind of shifted my feelings about what it really took to restart a nation like 2,000 years after its demise and how much of a remarkable feat that was.
I mean, it is such a seminal book. For those who don't know the story, can you give us like a two-sentence synopsis of Exodus?
So it essentially goes from being a displaced Jewish person after World War II trying to get to British Mandate Palestine, and tells the story of a bunch of different people as the nation is founded. Some people who were born in Israel, some people who were born in America, how everybody kind of comes together.
The way that you're describing its impact on you was so much of the impact that it had on so many American Jews. It really, you know, credited with changing people's perceptions of Israel. Certainly in Soviet Jewry was credited with creating a strain of Zionism there that led to so many Soviet Jews wanting to move to Israel. And also the hero of the story, Ari Ben-Kanan, was like a type of Jewish hero that we really hadn't seen before.
Yeah.
I wonder, you write these sweeping sagas, so I wonder if that's a thread that felt relevant to you.
Yeah, I think there's something about books like Exodus where it covers a long period of time that I found really appealing. And the idea of following characters through a lot of different trials and challenges in their lives and how the external world puts in some of those challenges and then how internally there are some of those challenges. I feel like, you know, The Light We Lost, my novel, it takes place over the course of 13 years and there's a lot of external societal issues that push the characters in different directions. And then some of it then becomes, you know, internal pieces that are pushing people around as well. But even that book ends in Israel. And that was something that I know I was looking at the time for where would Gabe, my journalist, like what would he be covering at that, in like 2013 and 2014 and the earlier Gaza war was one of my choices and I said, you know, I want to set that there. And I got to go on a research trip to Israel to sort of figure out where my characters were going to go, where they were going to live, what the hospital was like and all of that, which was a really cool bonus to deciding to set part of my book there.
Yeah, and I was curious about that and what made you want to have that very critical plot element happen there.
You know, I feel like part of what I like to do in my books is call attention to various things. And by including them in a story, it becomes less of a news piece and more like you can see how things affect people. I made some choices about what I was going to include. And you know, the book starts on September 11th, for example. So for a lot of readers now who were born after September 11th or were too young to really remember September 11th, I wanted that to be not just a fact in a history book, but like here's how it affected real people. Even though my people are fictional, the sort of emotionality of it, I hope feels real. I think that the sort of conflict in Israel at the time that has been a conflict in Israel since before its founding, since the days of Exodus, I wanted that to sort of shine a little spotlight on that to say here's a thing that's happening in the world and it's not just a line of news, like here's how it has affected real people.
Yeah, it's something I really appreciate in your novels. I wonder if you were to reread Exodus now, if you think it would resonate differently.
I bet it would. I bet it would. I mean, I think even just being an older person with more experience of life and more understanding of the world, I think everything resonates slightly differently. When I was in grad school, I got an MFA in actually writing for children and young adults, which isn't what I'm doing right now, but I read a whole bunch of novels that I had read when I was eight or nine or ten or eleven, again when I was 25 or 30 or whatever, however old I was. And there were so many things that I saw with the extra decade or so of experience, two decades of experience in my life that I thought, oh wow, this is more meaningful or this was so powerful to me back then and now it's not or whatever it is. So I think that reading anything when you yourself are a slightly different person, and we're all changing always, you take different pieces from it. And I also feel that way about writing, to be honest. If I had tried to write The Light We Lost now, 10 years after I originally wrote it, it probably would be a different book. And had I tried to write the sequel earlier, it probably would have been a different book. So I feel like there's just so much about what you take creatively from work as a reader and as a writer based on your own life experience.
Yeah. And you also work as a publisher of children's books, so you spend a lot of time with other people's books, with your own books, with children's books. Were you always a big reader and writer as a kid?
I was. I was really lucky because my mom was an elementary school teacher. She's retired now, but she was a reading specialist and always encouraged reading. She always read to me and encouraged writing too. My very first story that I wrote, I guess you could say, I was three years old and I told my mom a story and she was like, let's write it down. And we wrote it down or she wrote it down and she gave me markers to do the illustrations and then she took it to school and laminated it. And I still have this story that I wrote, the first story I ever wrote when I was three years old. And she was really encouraging throughout my whole life to keep telling stories and writing them down or creating them, you know, creating artwork for them if I wanted to. Actually I ended up handing it off to some friends in first grade who were better artists than I was. And I was like, listen, I'm going to do the words, but I need you to do the pictures because you're better. So maybe I, I was always an editor at heart.
Book Two: A Jewish Book from Adulthood — Acts of Faith by Eric Siegel.
So that book starts in New York City. There's an Orthodox Jewish community and a Catholic community that are near each other. And it talks about the way the characters kind of interact and as they get older, sort of what happens between them and how they change and their worlds change and what that sort of means. And I think it was a book that I was really fascinated by because of the pizza bagel-ness of my family and how there are these crossovers, these spaces where the religions kind of match up in a way and that friendship and love and family can happen across religion and across cultures. And I think that was really important to me too, especially coming from an interfaith, intercultural marriage.
I haven't read it, but what I understand is that the characters are not just like a Jewish character and a Catholic character. Like one is about to be a rabbi and the Catholic boy, he’s studying to be a priest?
Priest, yeah, he is.
They're really very rooted in their belief system. I wonder if that sort of tension between tradition and like personal desire, if that meant something to you then.
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think one of the characters, so there's the two male characters that you just mentioned, Daniel and Timothy, I think were their names. And then there's Deborah, who's Daniel's sister. And she starts out modern orthodox. Yeah, I guess they're, I think they're modern orthodox, or maybe they're even more orthodox than modern. But ends up moving to Israel and becoming much less religious, though her religion is still very important to her. I always found that really interesting too, that all of the characters were finding their own way for their religion to be meaningful to them. And that it wasn't necessarily that there is one path always to how to have a meaningful relationship with God or how to have a meaningful relationship with your religious traditions. And that you can do it in so many different ways and that that's fine.
And it doesn't make you any less of a Jewish person. It doesn't make you any less of a Catholic person. Like you can have your own relationship with God and your own relationship with religion. And if that's meaningful to you, then it's meaningful. And I think there's something really beautiful and reassuring about that.
Yeah, and how have you found your way as an adult in your relationship to religion and Judaism?
It’s been interesting because I feel like probably in like high school-ish, I thought, and middle school-ish too, I guess maybe like right around bat mitzvah era and then right after that, I was much more involved in my synagogue and my youth group and being Jewish was a big part of my life, like just my daily life. And then going to college and afterward, it sort of fell away a bit and I still celebrated holidays and I still appreciated culture and read all the books and everything. But it wasn't really until I got married and had a daughter, who's now she's a little over four, that I began really thinking like, this is actually something I want to pass on to her as important. I want her to know that she's Jewish. I want her to know that these are the prayers and these are the songs that Jewish people have been reciting for millennia. And I want her to know these holidays and these stories. And my mom signed her up for PJ Library, which is awesome. And she's been getting all of these books about Jewish holidays and Jewish traditions that, it’s been really special to me. And I'm really glad to sort of come back to it and to know that all of the knowledge and all of the love and all of the sort of, I don't know, the place in my heart where Judaism has lived is still there and it just kind of is taking up a little more space now.
Yeah, can shift over time. I had read in an interview with you where you mentioned that your father before the end of his life had converted to Judaism.
He did.
I was curious about that.
Yeah, so his whole adult life after he married my mom, my dad belonged to the synagogue. He ran some of the like events for the couples club and all of that. Like he, he was really into it. And when my sisters and I had our bat mitzvahs, the rabbi said to him, it was a very reformed congregation. They were like, do you want to come up and say prayers? Do you want a Hebrew name? Like, what do you want to do? And he was like, I’d love a Hebrew name. Like, yes, I'll learn the prayers. And I think he very much just enjoyed being part of what our family was doing. At some point, I think we'd all gone to college and the synagogue was offering adult bar and bat mitzvah classes. And my mom had never had a bat mitzvah as a kid. I think she was, it just wasn't something that people did very often. She was like, I want to have a bat mitzvah. My dad was like, I want to have a bar mitzvah! And the rabbi was like, well, that's very nice, John, but you have to be Jewish first. He decided to go through conversion classes and officially become Jewish, even though he had been acting as a Jewish man for 20 years or whatever. Then my parents had a joint bar and bat mitzvah, which was so much fun and just like a great moment for our family.
That's so sweet. How old were they when they had their bar and bat mitzvahs?
My mom was maybe in her mid-50s. My dad was maybe 60. They were definitely older when they did it and they threw themselves a big party and everybody was dancing and it was a lot of fun.
Book Three: A Book that Changed Your Worldview — Uncomfortable Conversations with a Jew by Emanuel Acho and Noah Tishby.
There was so much in it that they talked about, about the sort of history of antisemitism. They can make kind of a straight line from things that happened so many years ago to things that are happening today or things people say today. And I think just having that understanding as a base really shifted how I thought about the reactions that people are having in the antisemitic events that have been happening currently, knowing like, actually this is where that's coming from. This is how that sort of filtered into the, I don't know, societal environment and how it's kind of being transformed into today. Like one of the things they were talking about was the sort of idea of Jewish people running Hollywood. And then Noah was talking about how there were actually a lot of Jewish people in entertainment in the US because they weren't allowed to do other things. And they were, you know, cut off from these other kinds of jobs. So this was what they did. And then that sort of how that then filters into “Jewish people run Hollywood” trope.
And then at the same time, there's the, like, idea of the cabal of Jewish people are running the world, which also runs, you know, ties into the Hollywood thing and it, like, kind of comes to a head. And I just thought that that wasn't anything I had really studied before or thought about very deeply before. And the book really just pointed out or made a number of connections that I was like, that really shifts how I'm thinking about what I've been seeing in the news. The concept of blood libel has sort of shifted through the ages and become now the real sort of focus on how Jewish people want other people dead. There's this idea of blood libel that goes through the ages. And that I thought was really, really powerful.
Mm-hmm. I mean one of the things I found so powerful about it is just that it's structured as a dialogue and just given the polarized times we're living in, you know, even if you sort of don't agree with the particulars that are being put forth in the book, just the idea of engaging in dialogue even when it's difficult I found to be really perfect.
I mean, I think it's so important always, but particularly now when you can be in your own bubble and you can hear all of the things that you think reinforced a million times and you can mute or block or unfollow anyone who has a different thought than you do. The fact that people are willing to engage in conversations and also come away with like, okay, maybe we don't agree about this. And that's okay too. But I see where you're coming from and I hope you can see where I'm coming from. And even if we don't get to the same place, we can at least understand. And I think that's really important. And I think that that book does that really beautifully because there are moments where Emmanuel Acho and Noah Tishby don't actually agree. And he says like, essentially, like, I see where you're coming from, but this is where I'm coming from. And like, this is why I feel this way. And I understand why you feel this way.
What a better world we'd be living in if everyone could have these conversations.
Book Four: The Book You’re Reading Now — The Stolen Queen by Fiona Davis.
I am reading The Stolen Queen by Fiona Davis, which is wonderful. It's also historical fiction, I guess we're sort of vibing with that in this interview. It's really fun and it's really well-crafted and there are a whole bunch of mystery aspects to it that I truly did not figure out until I got to the end of the book. So it was great. I just finished it like, I want to say like three days ago.
Book Five: The Author's Latest Book — The Love We Found by Jill Santopolo.
So The Light We Lost was the first book in this duology that is now a duology that came out about eight years ago. And it's the story of Lucy and Gabe who meet on September 11th, 2001 at Columbia University. And then it follows them for the next 13 years as they kind of move in and out of each other's lives and who they are to each other and what they mean to each other kind of shifts and changes based on circumstances. And then The Love We Found starts 10 years after The Light We Lost leaves off. And Lucy essentially has to deal with the aftermath of what happened in The Light We Lost and figure out whether secrets she's been keeping for 10 years should be shared, whether she will ever be able to move on, whether she will ever be able to find someone who means as much to her as Gabe meant to her.
It's such a beautiful story and really it's framed around this question about free will and fate and that all kind of kicks off with September 11th, which you alluded to earlier. So I'm wondering what the resonance of September 11th was for you.
So I was in college at Columbia University on September 11th, 2001. And I felt like for me and for a lot of my friends who were there that day, it made us really realize that life is finite and you never know how much time you're gonna get. You never know what's gonna happen and that if there's something you wanna do, you should go after it. And if there's something you wanna be remembered for, you should try and make that thing happen. And I think that that sort of reevaluation and recognition of the limits of life.
Did it change something for you personally? Like were you on one path and heading down another?
I think it really just secured in me the fact that I wanted to make books and I wanted to work in children's books and create stories that could help shape the future in a way that felt good to me, empowering to me.
So tell me a little bit more about that. What draws you to children's literature? And what draws you to the books that you choose to publish specifically?
So what draws me in general to children's literature is two things. One is I really feel like if you can get kids to love books when they're young, you kind of give them this gift for a lifetime because they will always be able to find solace in stories and it will always be meaningful to them to read. And I also feel like kids are so malleable and open. And if you can expose them to the ideas of their own power, their own ability to change the world, that they can question the status quo, they can admire other people who are different than they are. And just the idea that we can all be proud of who we are and at the same time be accepting and respectful of people who are different. And that if you can sort of get stories that showcase all of those things out into the world, it has the potential to open up the next generation of readers to a world that feels kinder and more empowering than the one we are in right now.
Yeah, I have four kids and reading with them and to them is just such a profound experience as a parent, I think, and what you're giving to them.
Yeah.
Yeah. I want to go back to what you were talking about earlier in our conversation about sort of framing your books with these real life events. So we talked about a pivotal event happening during the Israel-Gaza war of summer of 2014. And this book also is framed around the Syrian refugee crisis and influx of Syrian refugees. So what made you want to sort of highlight that moment as well?
Well, I think the Syrian refugee crisis was, at the time in 2013, 2014, which is when that part of the story sort of happened, was something that was getting a lot of attention in the media and would have been something that Gabe covered. So that was sort of, in part, I was looking at things like what would he have been doing in that moment in time? But also, the attitude toward refugees and immigrants right now is not necessarily one that I agree with. And I wanted to sort of shine a light on refugees and immigration and migration and why people leave. And there's a poem that I quote, or that Lucy quotes, I guess, in The Love We Found by Warsan Shire, I think is how you say the last name, that paraphrasing says, you don't put your family in a boat unless the boat is safer than land. I think that one of the things that was important to me to show in this book was that if you are leaving a country, if you are becoming a refugee, this isn't something you would choose to do. This is because you need to do this. This is because your family is not safe and you are not safe. And if this were your family, if your family needed to leave where they live because they were not safe, you would want other people in other countries to embrace them. And I think that that's something that I tried to say without saying it by featuring Syrian refugees in The Love We Found.
Yeah, and also having Gabe the character, his own work, there's such a beautiful layered way of calling attention to it in a way that was fully, you know, integrated into the story. I really appreciated that. And I also want to just note the other refugee in the story is Eva, who's an older woman who's friends with Lucy, and you give her a background of being a Holocaust survivor. So I wondered about that.
Yeah, that was something in Stars in Italian Sky and in this book, I wanted there to be stories of Jewish people during World War II where it's just part of life. It's just part of who they are. There are people still walking around who had these experiences and their life isn't about these experiences. Eva is an artist, she's a wonderful friend, she is a romantic, she's lived this full life, but this is who she is. This was her experience. And I wanted to leave a world that felt like my real life world where Holocaust survivors are our neighbors and our friends and are real. I think that a lot of the information I see about how many people think the Holocaust didn't happen is horrifying to me. So if I can put the story of a Holocaust survivor as part of the fabric of one of my novels, I want to do that just as a sort of affirmation that like this happened, these people are real.
I wondered about the idea, I think it's the character is Dax, who we get to know in The Love We Found, who's a doctor and working with the refugees. He talks about pain being purposeful, and he has his own pain in his personal story. I wondered about that idea that pain is purposeful.
I think what I had been thinking about then is that, mean, pain is pain, but you can take your pain and make it purposeful or make it feel purposeful at least, so that, you know, I think Eva says she takes her pain and turns it into art. He sort of takes his pain and feels that if it means he can be a better doctor, then there was a purpose to it, and it gives meaning to something that might otherwise just be awful.
I guess I wonder having spent so much time with these characters over the course of, I don't know when you started writing The Light We Lost, but it's been probably a decade of your life.
Yeah, for sure.
What is it about them that you feel like has so connected with readers? I mean, this book is translated into 35 different languages and millions of readers. What is it about them?
I don't know! If I knew I would replicate it with every book I wrote. I know that there's a level of intimacy in the stories because Lucy is talking to Gabe in both books. And I think that that gives an additional layer of vulnerability and honesty that maybe is something that people can connect with. And I think when you meet someone and you have a really honest, vulnerable intimate conversation with them. feel some kind of connection and maybe that is sort of being replicated here because of the style. I don't really know though.
That's so interesting. Because you use that kind of device in some other of your books, in Everything After, the narrator is addressing something to it. You know, it's a diary, but she's writing to a particular character. So what is it about that structure that you like doing?
I mean, I think part of it is that it limits how you tell the story because for The Love We Found, I had been thinking, well, does Lucy talk to Gabe again or is she talking to someone else? Is she talking to a child or is she talking to a friend or whatever? And I realized she would focus on different things if she was telling the story to a child, one of her children. She would focus on different things if she was telling the story to a friend and that there is something really, I don't know, focusing, I guess, on saying she's telling the story to this particular person that she has this particular relationship with that is a very intimate relationship in very specific ways. And so here's what she would share and here's how she would share it. And here's what she wouldn't share. And like that gets left out of the story. So it kind of gives me a clear mandate of what I should be including.
So that I find interesting and I also just find it interesting writing with that level of intimacy. I started writing that way for The Light We Lost because I had gone through a breakup and I kept thinking, like, for weeks later that there were things I would see and I would think, oh, I have to tell him about this. Oh, he would really love this. Oh, I wonder what he would think about this.
And there was this realization that this man that I'd been with for three years had sort of infiltrated my inner monologue and that there was something so intimate about that. And I wanted to sort of capture that feeling of being so connected to someone that they have infiltrated your inner monologue and become your inner monologue. And for these books, it's not exactly what happens, but it's sort of that feeling.
Yeah, that makes sense to me. I mean, I think that is what connected me as a reader was just you feel so much a part of their story and so much a part of their connection. It's really beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing all of this with us today. I hope people will, if they haven't yet read The Love We Found, I hope they'll find it. And it's just a beautiful story, again, of life and fate and choices and all of those things. So thank you so much for being here.
Thank you so much for having me. This was such a wonderful podcast and actually, apropos of nothing, not knowing that I was about to come on this podcast, a friend of mine recommended the podcast to me three days ago. Yeah, I was like, hey, I'm going on that.
That's so great. So honored, that's amazing. I love that. That's great.
Thank you so much for joining us today for The Five Books. If you enjoyed this show, please recommend it to friends and family. You can even send them your favorite episode. Our guest today was Jill Santopolo talking about her novel, The Love We Found. You can find a link to the book and all the others Jill discussed in our show notes. You can find transcripts and more at www.fivebookspod.org. You can also find us on Instagram @fivebookspod or on Facebook at the Five Books Podcast. If you have feedback for us or an author recommendation, send us an email at team@fivebookspod.org. 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 Dina Friedman. Thanks especially to the Jewish Book Council.
