Karin Slaughter

[00:00:00]

Hello, everyone. Welcome back. So I am so excited to share with you today's episode, which is. From the vault. . What the author favorite author reads and recommends. So this episode is actually was recorded back in summer 2021. It was early pandemic. And I want to set the stage at that point.

This podcast had around about 300 episodes. At that time from March, 2020, all the way till.

September, 2021, I would spend in Chicago and I was by myself and just move to the city two weeks before the shutdown. And I was just like, I have nothing to do. There were no events were happening. So a lot of publishers started reaching out to see if I can actually interview the author. And that's how this podcast came to be.

It was like a massive explosion of a lot of interviews. And so I decided you don't want, one of the things to do is go back to those old Lin RIAs to see what was life like, like then. And she'd give them a new light. And so give you some recommendations from hopefully backlist [00:01:00] titles and you can now pick up. And for the library and you can read them

so today's episode is with Karin slaughter. She came in the shell on summer 2021 based on it. So we talk about the pandemic as she does include the pandemic in her book at the time, which was false witness. So it's early pandemic days. So you remember shutting down, not knowing what's going to what's happening, cuffing, toilet, paper, everything in between.

We talk about the isolation and we talk about like how surprisingly it was even for introverts to be in the isolation that we were in living in that time. It was fascinating to see this like little snapshot F like, what was life, three years ago, even though it feels like yesterday or feels like a decade ago. , I hope you enjoyed this episode and Every other Friday, you'll hear some from the waltz episodes. I'll start to bring them back.

Some of those episodes, , if you have any . If he has a gesture. That's where authors are specific episodes you would like to see feel free to email me [00:02:00] at Laura at poetry. Next block.com. And I'll be more than happy to chat with you. All right.

Enjoy the episode.

karin-slaughter-71721-9-19-am: Hi, Karen. Welcome to watch your next podcast.

It's my pleasure. Thank you. So happy to have you here. Tell us a little about yourself. Well, I'm a very young woman. You can't really see me. So I'm tall blonde and thin. I have three cats, all of whom wishes that they were in a single cat household. And I write books. So how does it work with having multiple cats?

Did you introduce 'em like one at a time or what was the whole process of Intro The cats? Well, the first two they replaced, well, not replaced. You can never replace. Right? Yeah. But they came after cats who had died. Okay. And 1 we found in a bucket in a barn. Yeah, and she's really she's just an angry young woman and the other 1 we rescued from a category.

So she's beautiful, but she's incredibly spoiled. I mean, there's like, a [00:03:00] social experiment going on in our house. And then the other 1 is this, boy cat who just showed up one day and was like I expect dinner at four. And I like my tubby rub, tummy rubbed. So, and they all hate each other.

So it's wonderful. It's fantastic. I love this. Yeah. I'm thinking I was a cat mom and my cat passed away last year. And so I'm like thinking this time to get a new tie, get a new companion, , I work from home.

I might as well have someone just to hang out with, ? And so I'm like, do I get one, do I get two? What does it look like? I've always wanted sisters or a sister and brother, cause I want to look at them rolling all over each other and loving each other. But my friend got. Two sisters and they hate each other.

Cat's going to cat. That's the thing. But if you get to at least one's going to love you. Yeah, that's true. That's like the log, I was looking off of my cat loved me, even though she had times where she was like annoyed of me, [00:04:00] but for the most part, she did love me and she did spend time with me.

But it was a hit or miss. It's a hit or miss. So, yeah, that's why I love them. You got to prove yourself every day. You do, and you gotta feed them and you gotta take care of them, but same time give them their space, like, yeah, no appreciation, no, yeah, it's completely thankless, it is a thankless job, so thank you for bearing with me with some cat lady, you said, so Let's see.

Let's. So when did you start writing? Like, was it, were you a reader beforehand or like writing was like something you always wanted to do? And then just you, well, I mean, I always wrote but I think it's different between just writing and then being writing something that can be published. So I've never really called myself an author until I had a book published.

That was just my mental thing in my head. Like, Oh, it's such a big reward to be called an author. So, but I, when I was six years old, I was writing little books about my [00:05:00] sisters being murdered and bludgeoned and they would be kidnapped and, but they weren't very suspenseful because no one cared.

I was just like an only child. So I know you're going to make parallels to my cats what I said about my cats, but this was like the truth. I should have been in an only child household. But those were my, my books that I wrote. So I was writing these murder stories and my dad would give me.

A quarter every time I wrote one because he thought they were hilarious. So I was incentivized from a very early age to be a writer. And so I just kept writing. And then as I got older, I realized there's such a thing as being like, the books, the names on the books are actual human beings.

Most of the books that I read were by men. So I didn't think women could really write. Stories and eventually, I discovered Flannery O'Connor and I was like, Hey, you assholes who've been telling me all my life that women can't be good writers and [00:06:00] you can't make a career of it. She's a weird lady who came from a small Southern town and people are still studying her works, even though she passed away.

So, hey, I think I can do this. And that's when I really. Got into being a writer for a profession, which, looking back, like, how stupid was I? Because no one can really make a living as a writer. Right? I know. I'm really lucky that I can do that, but it just was something I thought was always going to happen.

From a very early age, I just I wrote and I think also, if you're a writer, you don't choose to write writing chooses you. So, I feel really kind of honored to have that though. It is a curse at times. . Since a young age, you were writing murder books, so, what, when you think about that, like, and think about like the little scene and then creating a brand of some sort of books, like, page turner, suspenseful, murder, kidnap, [00:07:00] lawyers, like all those different things.

Like, did you ever imagine that this was going to be a brand or did you think of something else? Like when you start to write, Well, the first, Look, I got my agent with was historical fiction. It had a murder in it though. And no, nobody wanted to publish it. And I said to my agent, can I see the rejection letters?

And I think she was really afraid I would write all of them and tell them to go fuck themselves. But so she like redacted their names and their addresses. Not very well. I could still see them. So I'm sorry, all those people I said, go fuck yourself. But the letters were really nice. And they said, we like her writing style.

We like her voice. We don't like this story. And so my agent said, what do you want to do next? Which is a great thing for an agent to say to you, right? Because it means they haven't given up. And I said, I've always wanted to write a crime novel because I love the thriller genre. I'm not sure if I can do it, but it's what I love reading.

I'm like from a very [00:08:00] young age, I was reading age inappropriate books about murder and that sort of thing. A lot of an rule and so I just I started writing what became blindsided my first published novel. And I wrote the bones of it in 18 days because that's how much time I had that I could take off from work.

And so, it's like, if you have 18 days, it's going to take 18 days. And I just really found my voice and I loved writing. About these crimes that I normally read about from a man's perspective and putting a woman's perspective because, a lot of tough guys at those times. If they had a woman who was sexually assaulted, their response was okay.

Well, the way to heal her is the hero makes love to her, right? Or if women were in these stories, they were there to be saved or screwed or usually both. And I wanted to do something different. And that's what I was set out to do a blind side. It's what I set out to do with all my books. I want everything, every [00:09:00] new book to be different from the previous one.

And you have a unique voice that has captured such a big attention, because it's like unique enough that there's crime, but there's page turners and there, I know a lot of parents, father fans, like they're super fans. Like, it's not even like, it's like, They read one book, they're like, no, we binge it all, so you have created a brand that's like a unique voice, like your voice has sparked, other people to come and buy the book, and dive bar and be super fans and talk about it, well, I do love that because I know how I feel. I'm super fans of certain writers. Some of them I met and I was like, ah, I can't be your fan anymore.

But that's all those are my fears. Someone's going to meet me and they're going to be like, no, don't like your books anymore. But you know, I love that. And I always think about. Those readers when I start a book, as much as I love all my readers, I don't really think about them when I'm writing because it has to be what I'm doing for me.

But I, when I, before I started, and after I [00:10:00] finished, I think about when I was a college student. And I dropped out just being full disclosure here. Which if you're going to do that, write a book. But I remember how much time and money it took for me to buy a new book from my favorite author, time like, because I was making minimum wage and.

Time working and away from my life and then just sit down and read it if they phoned it in I was so pissed off. I took it personally And so I you know, I know that everybody doesn't love every single one of my books I mean they should but you know, some don't but i'm really conscious of the fact that I never want them to say She just phoned it in right?

They might say I like the other ones better than this one, but they're never going to say she just did it for a paycheck

Let's talk about your latest release false witness tell us the elevator pitch and what should we expect without giving spoilers? I'm really bad at elevator pitches. Like when people say, what's [00:11:00] it about? I'll say it's about 500 pages, which, honestly given the times we're living in, that should be enough.

Cause you know, what's better than a big juicy book. But it's about two sisters, Lee and Callie. Who experienced a horrific trauma when their children and we catch up with them 20 plus years later, and we see where they are in their lives. And this trauma comes back to haunt them because it's a thriller.

And that's what usually happens in life also, but mostly. You read about the more horrific things in thrillers, which is the part I love, but it's a book that also takes place during the pandemic. It's not about the pandemic, but I kind of just wanted to capture how insane our lives are. And it really helped in a lot of ways to have the pandemic incorporated into this just plot wise.

So, it's like a kind of roller coaster read and it's a lot about trauma. And how early childhood trauma can really affect us as adults and change the course of our lives. So [00:12:00] Chad, because you mentioned the pandemic, so, and you incorporated the pandemic, so what was the process of incorporating the pandemic without going to the, even though you're going through the pandemic, like, it's like, is there, was it an escape for you?

Like incorporating, it was a non escape and just basically just a reminder. And then Girl, it was just anxiety left and right. Well, because everything kept changing. And like, people need to understand what the word novel means. It's not just a book. It means new. So, we were learning as we went along.

It reminded me a lot about, when I was in high school when the AIDS crisis hit or junior high and, you didn't know anything. It's like, you should get kissing or touching someone's hand and, now we know a lot about HIV and AIDS just like we know a lot about the coronavirus and COVID.

19, but so when I was writing it in real time, I had to keep adjusting everything just to accommodate and, I kind of had to [00:13:00] predict things that would happen too. And especially when the vaccines were announced. I mean, it was halfway finished with the book and the vaccines come out. I was like, ah, yeah, I go back and put vaccines in and, Fortunately, one of my favorite books that I took in college I took an English course in college, and they taught pale horse pill writer, which is a short novel in a greater collection by Catherine and Porter, who was also called Kelly when she was a child.

And I remember. hearing it, reading about it in textbooks in high school, it was like a paragraph and then the rest was, we're the greatest nation in the world. But just not really understanding what a pandemic was until I read Pale Horse, Pale Rider, cause Catherine M. Porter experienced this herself.

She had the Spanish flu. Her body temp got so high, it turned her hair white, and she was a young woman when this happened, and she had all kinds of lingering health effects, but the visceral experience of being in the pandemic was [00:14:00] captured by her in a way that only fiction really can tell you the story.

And so I wanted to do that in my book and, catch some crazy things, like when people cough. The way you look at him or used to look at him now. Thank God for the back. You don't know. Cause it can be anti vaxxer. I know. Right. Oh yeah. Yeah, exactly. Or the fact that in Atlanta, at least the distillery started making hand sanitizers.

So everybody smelled like tequila. And, just all those little things that we might forget about, I wanted to capture, but it was hard. It was really hard. And it was a difficult choice to make. And I talked to a lot of writer friends of mine who are like, no, I write escapism or no, it's too awful.

And Mike Connelly told me he was going to put it and he was working on a Lincoln lawyer that came out in the middle of the pandemic and he, like, pulled it back so he could incorporate. And The early stages of the pandemic into the book, because, we started seeing it in prisons and jails in such a [00:15:00] horrific way.

It was almost as bad as nursing home. So, I thought, well, if Mike's going to do it, I think I'm clear on this. And his comes out first. So if it's really just bashed, then I can pull back from it. Well, you're the first author that has included the pandemic that I've interviewed. And I've interviewed about a hundred authors this past year.

So it's like, it's a quite a few. And there are a lot of the consensuses. We want to write for escape. We don't want to talk about it. We're not sure. I don't, it was tough enough writing about during the pandemic, let alone write about the pandemic, like it's too much anxiety. And so I'm glad you were able to give us like a diary of, of reminders of the things you forget.

Like we were in that phase where like. Emerging from the cocoon, and it's like, you forget like the trauma and the expectations and the toilet paper and yeah, like, that's the point, because I talk about Callie [00:16:00] and Lee experiencing this horrific trauma. We've got entire generations who are going through a very traumatic period right now.

Well, we know From studies about childhood trauma that if you experience it early on, you're as an adult, more susceptible to diabetes, heart disease, depression, you're more predisposed to alcohol and drug abuse. I mean, there are all kinds of things that trauma. Holds on to in the body and, I thought, well, this is a great parallel to talk about what, what we're going through as far as trauma and tie that into what they're going through.

Because who knows what's going to happen 20 years from now, if you're looking for a career change, psychiatry, or inventing drugs to help people with depression, that kind of those are going to be unfortunately growth industries. Yes, it is. Oh, well, thank you. Thank you for giving us a diary of a reminder of what was our time of 2020, which was something that we [00:17:00] may never forget.

Yeah, that shit was crazy. I have to tell you, I spent a whole year, I moved to a new place two weeks before the pandemic. So moved out of state, I left my house and just basically spent a whole year. Indoors in a big apartment by myself. So it's quite an experience to, to realize like, Oh, life is very different.

Yeah. Well, are you very introverted? Because I am, and I thought it would be easy, but it wasn't. It wasn't. I am an ambivert, like I'm an extrovert at some points, but I do need my time off. And so what I ended up doing was I ended up overbooking myself and did a bunch of author interviews because publishers were like, there's no events.

Let's put them on a podcast. And so I had a bunch of them. And so I was just like, constantly like having these meetups with new people, even though I have not seen like. I only talked to the Starbucks [00:18:00] barista. Like, those are the only people I've seen in my real life. And I'm like, Oh, let me go grab my Starbucks.

When, but Starbucks was closed for a couple months. So it was like, I had, there were months where I was like, I didn't talk to anyone. I didn't know anyone, but it's, so it was tough. Like, I think there's a part, it's like you were,

there's like expectation that you should have master hobby or ride the buck or do the thing. I lost like, lost weight or exercise or, and I was, I, yeah, I did the same thing and I was like, well, what about potato chips? I'll just sit in here and eat those. Yeah. Yeah. Like, it's just like, well, no, we're going through trauma.

Yeah, exactly. Lean into it. Lean into the trauma, lean into the anxiety, like, we're unsure what's going to happen, stock up on toilet paper and see how you survive, yeah, well look, anybody who got through it, I mean, people have had horrific losses. It took the AIDS pandemic in America. [00:19:00] 10 years or what?

No, I'm sorry. 20 years to get to 600, 000. We did that with coven in a year and a half. So, like, anything you did to get through it short of murdering someone way to go. Well, well done. That's what I think. We should all get a pass. You should all get a pass. Yes. All right. So let's chat about some book recommendations.

Do you have any book recommendations that you can share with us? Yes. I am, I got several here because my buddies got galleys out. Lisa Unger is one of my favorite. She's got this last girl ghosted is her new one. I don't know when it's coming out, but I just finished it. It's fantastic. And Kate White sent me 1.

I can't remember. It's a Bailey book. I love it. I love. Have you done? Have you interviewed Cecilia Ahern? She's an Irish gal. No, but she. Delightful. All right. Wonderful. I'll reach out to her people. Yeah. So she, I love this short story collection, Roar. She did P. S. I Love You. [00:20:00] Yes. If you know that. She is so sweet.

She, and she likes my books and she's always so complimentary and happy. I'm a little worried that she might be planning to kill me. Like it's like a deep fake. But I also have like this Nonfiction that I just finished how the word is passed by Clint Smith. And it's fantastic. It's just about the language of our places and things and that, and how they're embedded in slavery times.

And, like Angola prison was a plantation and we still call it that. So it was just, especially being in the South, like knowing these places, but not. What the name signify it was really shocking, but of course, it's not just the South because guess what racism is everywhere. Yeah. Spoiler alert. It happens in the North in the West as well.

Yeah, it's a subtle racist, but it's exactly. Yeah. I mean, when I was in New York many years ago, there's a, [00:21:00] a grouping of statues that commemorate these people who are lost to lynching during the height of the Civil War. A lot of New Yorkers were so angry about the cost of the war that they rounded up some black people and lynched them just out of anger and horribleness.

So we don't realize those things are not just all around us, but they're in our psyche.

, these are great recommendations. So tell us where you can find it online. You can find me Karin slaughter. com on Facebook, Twitter. I'm not doing tick tock. I just can't Instagram, all the fun sites. We're all the cool kids are. And if you want to see my cats and many other cats, though, Facebook's the place for that.

I'll be on Facebook. We hear cats. Awesome. Thank you, Karen, for being on the show. It's my pleasure. Thank you.