Podcast Transcription: Kelly Link

Mar 27

Mar 27 Podcast Transcription: Kelly Link

This episode, Emma Straub (she/her), co-owner of Books are Magic, interviewed Kelly Link (she/her), author of The Book of Love: a novel about three high schoolers are brought back from the dead and must complete a set of tasks and trials to win their lives back, all while evading a demon who is determined to stop them.

The two talk about fairy tales, novel structures, and what it’s like to own a bookstore as an author.

Want to listen to the full episode? That’s right here!

Emma

Okay. Here's what I'm going to start by saying, Kelly, there is no one like you. You are, I think, one of the few writers who I think I could identify within like a few sentences blindfolded. Just because your voice and your perspective are always your own. And I just think you're the greatest. And I'm so happy to have you on our podcast!

Kelly

That feels so good that it almost hurts. Thank you! I don't feel that way about my own work. I am always so tired of my own point of view, my own voice when I start working on a project. And yet as a reader, I feel that one of the great joys is feeling that you are beginning to identify the DNA of particular writers. My goal as a reader is to involve myself in somebody's point of view. And especially when somebody has a career with a lot of books, that sort of pleasure of learning to recognize, I guess, the pond that you're about to go for a swim in.

Emma

Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about your pond because I think your pond is, it's a rarefied pond. You know, I would say that you are one of the world's very best short story writers, and The Book of Love is your first novel, so what freedoms did it grant you to approach this book? And what sort of fears did you have? Because I imagine that there were probably a lot of both.

Kelly

I think that I always have trepidation when I'm beginning something new. But yes, for the novel, the level of trepidation or a sense of being unworthy to a project felt pretty high. I think that the freedom that it gave me was, one, the freedom to try something new and see what a larger space grants in terms of permission. It meant that I could really hunker down with a piece of work for a long time, which I've never done before. And I think the hard part of it was when you feel that you have that much space and that much freedom having to decide what the limitations are because, for any sort of narrative project or any sort of creative project, freedom is a very large thing. And you can't make art out of just freedom. You have to come up with constraints or problems that you're interested in or a sort of framework in which to put all that freedom, so to speak.

Emma

Yeah, well, I mean, one of the things that I love so much about the book is that you, I mean, you know, it's a big book when you look at it, but when you open it, it's often, you know, some of the chapters are very short. And so I felt like I sort of noticed… I noticed you doing that. And I don't know if you were doing it consciously, but I was like, “oh, but it's still in these smaller pieces.”

Was that part of how you convinced yourself that you could do it, or part of the structure that you gave yourself in terms of tackling this huge project? To break it down and to structure it the way you did?

Kelly

I think both, but that… I think that the short chapters came to me pretty early on and for reasons that were obscure to me. One, I knew that it was going to be a large project. Two, I knew that I wanted all of the characters to feel like they were the protagonists of their own story. And so the short chapters, and sort of being able to move in and out very quickly of their points of view, made it seem to me as if they all ought to have equal weight in terms of how I wanted the reader to feel about them, but also how I wanted me to feel about them.

And, you know, I think the thing about short chapters as a reader for me is– the experience when I read short chapters is I think, “well, I'll just read one more chapter.” And then I think, “well, I'll just read one more.” And then I think, “well, it's so short, I'll just do another five.” And so I knew that– my hope was that readers would feel the same way, that they would never feel that they'd gotten through some extraordinary amount of work and then they could take a rest. But rather, I wanted them to feel when they finished a short chapter, “oh, well, that one looks interesting too. And that chapter was so short, I'll keep on going.” But it definitely was also a strategy to keep me writing it.

Emma

Well, it worked. I mean, certainly as a reader, I felt exactly that way, the way that you just described, where you finish one and you think, oh, it's 10 o 'clock already, I should go to bed, or oh god, now it's 10:30 and I just read three more!

Kelly

Oh good.

Emma

Oh, but it's just perfect.

Okay, so I, as you know, because I sent it to you, I loved your book so much that I wrote like a whole newsletter about it, calling it The Best Book (Novel) of 2024, even though it was published in January or February! February, but I think I wrote it in January. And I stand by that. And one of the things that I love the most about it is that it was so full of what I think of as sort of Kelly Link Specials, the first of which is teenagers. You have always written, or not always, but you have often written about teenagers and young people. And one of the things that I think you do so well is that you take them absolutely seriously. Not that you don't present them as occasionally ridiculous or whatever, because of course they are, because they're humans. But what continues to interest you about people in that stage of life?

Kelly

You know, well one, I just want to say I feel there's a real advantage to having a book come out early in the year because people are still feeling generous. You know, the great wave of really fabulous books that is coming down the pipeline, they haven't all arrived yet. And so for a big book to come out, I'm really glad that it came out early in the sense of page count while people maybe still had some time, including you.

You know, teenagers, adolescents, and even childhood has always felt like, one, a space where there's the potential for the fantastic. That children, but also adolescents, take really extraordinarily strange things coming over the horizon at them with a certain amount of, I wouldn't say aplomb because often their reactions, you know, and my reactions when I was a teenager was, “oh my God, this thing that's happening is catastrophic,” but they are, I think, aware that the future may be full of strangeness and tragedy, but also wonderful things. And that to me feels like it's a piece with the trajectory of narratives that are allowing magic or fantasy to begin to intrude into everyday life.

And the other thing too is I think that readers are prepared to forgive adolescent characters for making very large mistakes. And it's not in fiction that we don't love and forgive adult characters for making mistakes, but I think it takes a little– it feels different that we remember what it felt like to be adolescents and we remember how large and extraordinary and terrible and wonderful everything felt. And so when the characters are experiencing that, if they're young enough, we think, “well, I felt the same way.”

Emma

It's so interesting to hear. I mean, because, you know, I also wanted to talk to you about the magic! About the magic in this book. And it's interesting to hear you say that, you know, that the teenagers and the magic are connected. And I think that you're right that, you know, both that things seem more possible or that, I don't know that various membranes seem more permeable when you're a kid, but yeah. I hadn't really– I hadn't really thought of that before but of course, of course you're right because you know the younger you are the closer you are to fairy tales and that sort of thing and to not maybe not quite understanding the difference between what's real and what's imaginary. And, you know, yeah, go on, please.

Kelly

I think that when you are young enough, you do believe that you may be immortal. You may be isolated from the community that you will find later on, but you're looking for them. But you don't necessarily have the resources that adults do. And so that quest feels a little bit more fraught and a little bit more high stakes.

Emma

Yeah! And that, you know, this book, I wouldn't describe it as, like, scary, but there is darkness and peril and blood. In addition to, you know, humor and teenage kissing, you know, it's like, it's all there, which is of course true of the best fairy tales, too. Like what good is Cinderella without a shoe full of blood? You know what I mean?

Kelly

Absolutely. And the way that the blood and beauty are connected, you know, the idea of something “lips as red as blood” is very striking and it's being used to convey beauty, but there's something violent there as well, obviously.

Emma

Yeah, yeah. I don't want to get too into the details of the plot just in case people have not read The Book of Love yet, which they should all do immediately. But I do think that that sort of line is something that you play with so much! Where there are these two characters who are magical and at first seem quite quite scary, at least one of them appears quite scary. And then by the end you think, “oh, they're boyfriends! They're boyfriends who can't really look at each other!” You know? Where you just sort of break, I don't know, I feel like you have space in this book to really break down all of those elements to things that feel so… grounded, so grounded in reality, which is a funny way to describe a book with a lot of magic in it. But it's true.

Kelly

Well, I feel pretty extraordinarily lucky in my own life that I have been able to arrange my life around love. You know, that I have a mother who now lives on the same acre that I do. I have a husband that I got to work with on a small press and now work on a bookstore with.

You know, I got to write, which I loved, and I've been able to make a life out of that. And so for me, part of writing this book was I got to organize this book around love, around love stories, around the idea of the different kinds of love. But in some ways, that's coming out of the way in which I have been allowed to live my life that I feel extraordinarily fortunate in, I guess, the things that my point of view came out of when I was writing this book.

Emma

I love that, Kelly. I love that. I also love– I also love that just, imagining how long it must have taken you also. I mean, I don't know when you started working on the book (you don't have to reveal such things if you don't want to).

Kelly

Uh, no, it was eight years. Which is a fair amount of time!

Emma

That's a really very, very fair amount of time. And it's, I mean, and it's a long time to focus on one, you know, to hold this many threads in your head and in your life. Like, you know, another thing that I love about this book, is that, you know, you mentioned having all of these characters who each feel, who rightly feel, that they are each the protagonist of their own stories. But one of the glorious parts of that, for a reader, is that you get so much!

One of my favorite threads is one of the characters, Mo, is a teenager, but his grandmother was a romance novelist. And I just loved every time she came back. I just, I loved it so, so much. And I, you know, I mean, just like everything that had to do with her, everything that had to do with her, I just, I just thought was incredible.

Are there threads like that, that you just felt yourself falling in love with? Like not that– or maybe parts that you hadn't thought would be sort of more integral to the plot or to the story, but that you just kept going back to because you were having so much fun with them?

Kelly

You know, Mo's grandmother, Marianne Gorch, is the backbone of the book and was sort of a guide for me in terms of how to think about the different stories. And in terms of age, I'm closer to her in age than I am to the other characters. You know, I don't have her publishing career, but I am really interested in writers like her who, you know, commit with their whole heart to a genre, who remain excited despite disappointments with the books that they are working on and who have enough success that they can keep on doing that work.

You know, she's not in the book to the level that other characters are, but she was, in some ways, I guess, the guiding star or the character that I would check in with if I was thinking about, you know, something that I was writing into the book or the trajectory of a storyline.

And the thing that, you know, ended up being a real pleasure that I didn't expect was the short chapters that I was able to write from the point of view of characters who did not recur.

Emma

Mm hmm.

Kelly

That ended up being a blast. I wouldn't say that it felt like short story writing, but it felt like a way of making a novel out of pieces, which appealed to me a great deal.

Emma

Yeah, yeah, I mean, but I will say, like, just for the record, you know, sometimes there are (I will not name any names) but sometimes people who are excellent, excellent short story writers publish novels, and then you read them and you think, “well, that's a collection of short stories.” You know? Some of those books are fabulous. I love those books. I'm not saying anything against those books, but I will say that is not what this book is. Clearly. Just for the record.

Kelly

I very much wanted to write a novel that was about as far from the short story as I could get. I figured if this is the one time I work on something, even if I couldn't make it work, I was going to think about what the novel was capable of. And I mean, I love short stories. I am a short story writer by heart, but I read novels. I love novels a great deal. I've edited novels for Small Beer, I work on a regular basis with people who primarily write novels. And so even though I write short stories, I think most of the conversations that I have had with other writers have been about novels. And so I put all of that, you know, I employed everything that I had ever heard anybody say about the novel or about novel structures, or I tried to when I was writing this.

Emma

You did it, Kelly!

Kelly

The next novel though will be very short. I'm actually going to try and make it feel as much like a short story as possible. I'm hoping to keep it at like 45,000, 50,000 words. I want it to feel, I guess, tonally of a piece. And honestly, that was one of the pleasures about the last book is I felt like I could move through different tones, different moods. But this I will try and keep as sort of a sustained tone.

Emma

Yeah, well, I mean, what a fun challenge to give yourself. I mean, you know, and I think that, The Book of Love, it finds itself in good company as a big, thick book, because right now, (I mean, as you know, as a bookseller) people are crazy for, 600, 700 page fantasy novels. Romantasy, I guess. I mean, is your book a romantasy? Kind of!

Kelly

You know, I think that there are elements of romantasy in it, but that's also an evolving genre. So I'm pretty sure a lot of people would kick it out.

Emma

Yeah, but you know, I was about to say that there's like no Dragon Sex in your book, but there is like, shapeshifter– there is shapeshifter sex, Kelly.

Kelly

And you're right, I absolutely have the potential for Dragon Sex and I botched it. I did not, in fact, take advantage of that opportunity. But I think there is a real taste right now, too, for the short novel, which is also cool.

Emma

Oh. Yes, yes!

Do you have favorite short novels? I love short novels.

Kelly

Oh, well, let's see. I loved Terrace Story.

Emma

Mm hmm. Mm hmm!

Kelly

Which moves… has a very limber sort of narrative movement. And in fact, you know, we could say that it works as a movement through three stories, but in fact, it also feels like it's doing something different from stories.

I loved Mrs. God, your Dad's very short novel/novella. You know, there's a, in genre and science fiction, fantasy and horror, there's an idea that there's– there are categories in between the short story and the novel.

Emma

Yeah.

Kelly

But let's dismiss that and just say things like Rachel Ingalls’ books, Mrs. Caliban.

Emma

Yes. Oh man. I read Mrs. Caliban recently. And you know, I think of Mrs. Caliban as one of those books that if you hang around bookstores long enough, someone will put it in your hand, you know? But otherwise you just, you just might not come across it! And I loved it so utterly. I just… what a, what a delightful pleasure. What a delightful pleasure.

Kelly

You know, I was thinking because the next thing that I will work on will be a ghost story. I was thinking of The Woman in Black–

Emma

Mmm! Oh yes!

Kelly

–which is maybe not quite as short, but so good. And it, you know, it gets in there. It does what it does. And then it exits very promptly.

Emma

I am interrupting myself and Kelly to ask some other author/bookstore owners what they love to sell the most.

Leah Johnson

Hi, I’m Leah Johnson, author and owner of Loudmouth Books, and these are the books that I love to hand sell: How You Get the Girl by Anita Kelly, If Tomorrow Doesn’t Come by Jen St. Jude, She Drives Me Crazy by Kelly Quindlen, and Heretic by Jeanna Kadlec.

Lauren Groff

Hello, this is Lauren Groff. I am the co-founder of The Lynx, a brand new bookstore in Gainesville, Florida, and I am so excited to hand sell so many books, but among those books are some great classics by the New York Review Books Classics including: The Summer Book by Tove Jansson. Spectacular! Everyone I've ever given it to has loved it. Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick, Their Eyes Were Watching God– this is not a New York Review Books Classics book, but it maybe should be– by Zora Neale Hurston. And I love this book because I'm in the state of Florida and it is currently one of the books that is being challenged and banned all over the place.

Speaking of banned books, this is going to be one of The Lynx’s big emphasis. We are going to push and celebrate and love the books that are currently being squelched all over the state. We're going to speak about cultural diversity. We're going to speak about LGBTQI issues. We're going to talk about the things that make the people in power really uncomfortable. And one of these books is The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. So that book I'm going to press into the hands of practically everyone who walks into this store. But you know, in Florida, honestly, there are places where even the dictionary is being banned. So...

Let's be honest, every bookstore is at this point a bookstore that's specializing in banned books. We're going to just let the culture reverberate outwards into the places that are feeling pinched at the moment. So, that's our job as booksellers: is to celebrate and love all books and all readers.

Emma

Yay!

Lauren

Was that okay?

Emma

Yes! That was wonderful! That was wonderful.

And now back to my conversation with Kelly Link!

Emma

I want to talk about a bookstore, your bookstore, having a bookstore, running a bookstore with your husband! You also, as you said, you know, have run Small Beer with Gavin for…I don't know how long, 20 years?

Kelly

I think 20… coming on 25, yeah.

Emma

25 years. Incredible. But so you own Book Moon, which is in East Hampton, Massachusetts. And how has it been? So how many years has it been now?

Kelly

We opened three months before everything shut down for a bit. Which honestly not ideal, but on the other hand, it meant that over the months that the bookstore was closed to the public, we had had three months to see how the community used the space, what sections they were interested in, where we could sort of make the passage of movement through the bookstore a little bit easier and we could paint some stuff. So honestly, it was not the worst period to open.

Emma

What do you enjoy the most about being a bookseller?

Kelly

Oh, I love the physical space. I love the sense of personalities that different bookstores have. I love that we are a small space surrounded by other excellent bookstores. And so we don't feel that we have to carry everything. What we feel is we can build up sections that we are interested in. We can carry a lot of backlist and we can send people to other bookstores if they're looking generally in a section. We can also do special orders. And I love our staff and I love hand selling. Our staff is wonderful. Yep.

Emma

So what books are the Classic Kelly Link Hand Sells? I feel like every bookseller has like five…

Kelly

The Go-To. Yep. Yep.

Emma

Yeah! Just the books where– my favorite thing at the bookstore is when someone walks in and they say like, “I want something good” and then they stop there, you know, and you just have full, full reign. So what if someone walks into Book Moon and says, “Kelly, I want something good.” What do you give them?

Kelly

Right? Well, I do tend to ask for a little bit of triangulation, like “what's two things that you've read recently?” But I will always hand sell a historical novel by Molly Gloss, The Hearts of Horses, which people are thrilled by. We sell a lot of copies of T. Kingfisher, who is enormously prolific. And you can sort of find a T. Kingfisher book that works for a particular customer. Megan Giddings’, The Women Could Fly. We've sold a lot of that. And then there's some… Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle, we hand sell a lot of that. And Dear Ursula, The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom. And Jeffrey Steingarten's The Man Who Ate Everything we sell a lot of.

Emma

Oh, it's so fun. It's so much fun. It just makes me want to walk in! I mean, because what you've just done is like, like as you were talking, I was just like… I was sort of walking around Books are Magic in my head to like, sort of different parts of the room that those books would be in, and they're not all in the same section! You know, like you're walking around, which is also something that I love in a bookstore when like, when a bookseller is like, “oh, hold on,” and has to hurry, sort of power walks across the room to grab something. Oh, I love that.

Kelly

The section that is the most delightful and surprising to me is the horror section. We have customers come from all over the valley because they know that we have a really in depth horror section. We have booksellers who love horror and have kept up to date with things and we have a lot of back stock. So that section, stuff comes in, stuff leaves, we order it again.

You know, I think a lot about the fact that we have a great stock section, we sell books from her, which we want to do. And then we think, oh no, now we have to replace them. And I always feel a little, “oh no, I sold it, so now I can't sell it to the next person, you know, until it comes back in three days.”

Emma

I know. Oh, isn't that the worst feeling–

Kelly

Yes!

Emma

–when someone walks in and you say, oh, I have exactly the book you need and you tell them all about it and they get so excited and then you say it as sort of as you're walking over to the section and then you get there and you look under, you know, L or whatever. And it's just not there because you're waiting for your copy to come back in.

Kelly

Yes! Yep. That’s right. Yep, that's right.

Emma

Oh, heartbreak, heartbreak.

Do you see your work as a bookseller as being separate from your work as a writer, or do you see it as sort of two sides of the work of Kelly Link?

Kelly

I think that I see it as two sides. I have never as a writer been good at sitting every day down to do some writing. I prefer to do that kind of work in large gulps. You know, that I will try and arrange to have a week in which that is primarily what I'm doing rather than systemic, “every day I will work for two hours.” My brain is just not set up to do that every day. But to be around books, to be talking about books, to be just reminded that books exist and that people come into the store and they want to read books and that they are hungry for stories does something helpful for me as a writer.

It's also overwhelming sometimes that there are so many good books that come out, you know, every Tuesday that occasionally I feel a kind of despair because– but the despair is not on behalf of myself as a writer. It's a despair because I think, “how can I find the right audience who will love this book if I can, you know, put it in their hands?” And maybe that's connected a little bit to being a writer in the sense that I feel like I should be doing the bookseller work more than I am doing it.

Emma

Mm hmm.

Kelly

That bookselling… I guess. Bookselling feels like it could take up all of my time and energy if I allowed it to. And so there is maybe that danger. But I think it's probably good to have something that you have to push back against in order to be reminded that the other kind of work that we do as writers matters too. You know, you have to assert that even to yourself.

Emma

Yeah, I think you're right. It does feel like having to claim your time to write from other things that are also vitally important to you does force you to take it really seriously. I mean, not that I ever didn't take it really seriously, but...

Kelly

Yeah.

Emma

But that it forces you to really, yeah, to sort of get your work done purposefully. Not in a fast way. I'm not as fast as I used to be. But just in a, “this is vitally important to my person sort of way.”

Yeah. Okay, last question, Kelly.

Kelly

Mm -hmm.

Emma

What are you reading? What are you liking?

Kelly

Oh, I am reading – well, II'm rereading right now Nicola Griffith’s Hild because I read her more recent novel Menewood and loved it and thought it's been so long since I read Hild, I will go back. And I was also curious to see if anything felt like it had shifted in between the space of those two projects.

Emma

When had you read it last?

Kelly

Hild, boy, when it came out, which would have been maybe eight or nine years ago.

*editing note: it came out in 2014!

Emma

Do you often reread books? Are you a rereader by nature?

Kelly

I am less of a rereader than I used to be because there are so many books and I'm more aware of how many books there are. But I… there is something really pleasurable about rereading a book. And I was just recently on a lot of planes. So I could take a really big book with me and not be afraid that I was going to finish it within the first 40 minutes of the flight. And I'm reading a sequel to a fantasy novel by Christopher Buehlman. The first book was called The Blacktongue Thief. This one is called The Daughters’ War, and it's a pretty classic epic fantasy, but so beautifully done that it's one of those books that I will give to people who have some reservations about fantasy genre, but who love an immersive character driven read.

Emma

You're such a good bookseller, Kelly!

Sources Mentioned:

The Book of Love by Kelly Link

How You Get the Girl by Anita Kelly

If Tomorrow Doesn’t Come by Jen St. Jude

She Drives Me Crazy by Kelly Quindlen

Kelly Link and Gavin Grant’s company, Small Beer Press

Terrace Story by Hilary Leichter

Mrs. God by Peter Straub

Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill