Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: Teddy Wayne writes novels you can't.
Speaker 1: Put You already know I'm ount numbered.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sorry, Carol.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: You know you can hang, I can hang, you can hang,
Speaker 2: all right. Teddy Wayne writes novels you can't put down.
Speaker 2: I know this because I've read all seven of them.
Speaker 2: They include The Winner, which has been optioned by Sony
Speaker 2: for a film starring Tom Holland, The Great Man, Theory,
Speaker 2: The Love Song of Johnny Valentine, Capitoil, and others. Teddy's
Speaker 2: novelist a screenwriter. He's also a freaking contributor to The
Speaker 2: New Yorker McSweeney's other publications too. He was a finalist
Speaker 2: for the Young Lions Fiction Award, pen Bingham Prize, and
Speaker 2: Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
Speaker 1: I feel like it's Outlander for guys. I'm just going
Speaker 1: to put it out there. But anyway, his new book,
Speaker 1: The au Pair, is a literary thriller that comes out tomorrow.
Speaker 1: We're not going to spoil it. We're going to get
Speaker 1: to that in just a moment. Teddy, of course, joining
Speaker 1: us in our Bloomberg Interactive Brokers Studio. Welcome, Welcome, Thank you,
Speaker 1: for having me. Your book is being kind of passed
Speaker 1: around our newsroom, to be quite honest, and different people
Speaker 1: reading it. Anyone who reads your book and I listened
Speaker 1: to a bunch of podcasts, it's often men who make
Speaker 1: really questionable, in some cases, really bad decisions. What's up
Speaker 1: with that?
Speaker 3: I think I'm just entransd by the idea of someone
Speaker 3: destroying their life, who has a pretty good one, a
Speaker 3: fairly accomplished or content life, but is driven by the
Speaker 3: American pursuit of more and more, more happiness, more money,
Speaker 3: more sex, more status, and that ambition is their downfall.
Speaker 1: Why are you so interested in that?
Speaker 3: I live in New York City. It's around I'm at
Speaker 3: Dereenburgh right now. That is so fair, the mecca of
Speaker 3: ambition and status and money.
Speaker 1: It does feel like we live in a society, certainly
Speaker 1: in the New York metro. It's never enough, right.
Speaker 2: It should be.
Speaker 3: We all know that instinctively, we all have been taught
Speaker 3: that over and over many times in our lives. But
Speaker 3: when you're actually presented with the opportunity and the potential
Speaker 3: to get more, it's very hard to turn it down.
Speaker 1: There were somewhere on a podcast you talked about billionaire specifically,
Speaker 1: and you were like, you know, that's not what people
Speaker 1: really want to be or shouldn't be. It's not like
Speaker 1: all of a sudden everybody is so happy or like
Speaker 1: everything solved.
Speaker 3: There is that stat I'm sure you guys know that
Speaker 3: that study that people's happiness rises to a certain income
Speaker 3: level and then maybe tails off. I think the original
Speaker 3: number is seventy five thousand dollars a year. They upgraded
Speaker 3: that to one point fifty or something because inflation. Perhaps
Speaker 3: I strongly believe that past a certain point, it actually
Speaker 3: goes down your happiness. That you might have more material comfort.
Speaker 3: Of course, you might feel in some sense like you
Speaker 3: one at life. But the people I know who are
Speaker 3: in that kind of ultra rich, high net worth category
Speaker 3: tend to have thinner relationships, tend to feel like, if
Speaker 3: they don't recognize it themselves, that people like them for
Speaker 3: their money and their power. And I think it's very
Speaker 3: difficult to have that kind of level of wealth, not
Speaker 3: even income, and still have an authentically happy life.
Speaker 2: Well, perhaps it's a good segue to talk about your
Speaker 2: new book, The O Pair. It goes on sale tomorrow.
Speaker 2: We're speaking with Teddy Wayne he's a novelist, author, screenwriter.
Speaker 2: The Pair is a literary thriller. It's about a middle
Speaker 2: aged novelist who lives in Brownstone, Brooklyn. He's married, the
Speaker 2: marriage is not so great. A young Norwegian o Pair
Speaker 2: enters the picture.
Speaker 1: It's trouble.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm not going to give everything away, but
Speaker 2: let's just say things get bit a lot messier, and
Speaker 2: it sounds like they're going to get you. Talk about
Speaker 2: writing about what you know and what you're surrounded by.
Speaker 2: That profile of Steven, the main character, middle aged, plays pickleball.
Speaker 2: I guess you play pickleball too. He has two kids,
Speaker 2: lives in a certain part of Brooklyn that's very similar to.
Speaker 3: You, adjacent to me. I live in Copple Hill in
Speaker 3: that Brooklyn heights.
Speaker 2: I do two kids. Just got across Atlantic Avenue to
Speaker 2: get to it.
Speaker 3: His career trajectory, in his financial situation in the household
Speaker 3: is different from mine. He had a massive hit when
Speaker 3: he was nine years earlier before the novel starts. His
Speaker 3: second novel was a bust. He's financially dependent on his wife,
Speaker 3: who works in private equity. That's not my situation at all.
Speaker 3: I've observed though both the plight of the novelist who
Speaker 3: had a sort of a big bang of an opening
Speaker 3: and then a whimper in their next phase. And I've
Speaker 3: observed separately a number of men who are financially dependent
Speaker 3: more or less on their wives, and they tend to
Speaker 3: respond to it better than Steven does. There's a lot
Speaker 3: of insecurity here, a lot of sense of emasculation. His
Speaker 3: wife is not too thrilled with the arrangement either. So
Speaker 3: I was interested in exploring this phenomenon that didn't really
Speaker 3: exist in America twenty plus years ago, certainly not thirty
Speaker 3: plus years ago. It's not widespread now, but it's much
Speaker 3: more common than you'd think, and there's nothing wrong with
Speaker 3: it objectively, but I think the genders have stilled. I'm
Speaker 3: trying to figure out how to how to adapt to it.
Speaker 2: I found it notable that you wrote about how when
Speaker 2: you started this process for writing this book, you started
Speaker 2: it as a screenplayer, maybe a short story that could
Speaker 2: turn into a screenplay that you could gift your agent,
Speaker 2: who could then go and sell it to a streaming service.
Speaker 2: The economics of writing a novel in today's environment is
Speaker 2: that the way you have to approach something in order
Speaker 2: to make the economics work, make it financially work, you
Speaker 2: have to think about all these different streams, income streams.
Speaker 3: If I didn't live in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, maybe I'd
Speaker 3: have a little more leeway. Because I live where I live,
Speaker 3: and I'm not a professor at a university. This is
Speaker 3: the only way I make my living is writing. So
Speaker 3: it's a bit of a rare breed now, I think again,
Speaker 3: the type of me, the guy who earns a living
Speaker 3: as a novelist, was in proliferation thirty plus years ago
Speaker 3: in American life, probably from like nineteen twenties up until
Speaker 3: about twenty ten. The industry is contracted greatly. It's much
Speaker 3: harder to make it living as a novelist, certainly as
Speaker 3: a literary fiction novelist. Let's call it so. Yes, I
Speaker 3: had this idea of thirty forty page short story. I'd
Speaker 3: had a nice film deal with a winner. Let me
Speaker 3: write this as a short story. We'll sell it to
Speaker 3: Hollywood for ip highly cynical origin story. I'm aware of that.
Speaker 3: Once I started writing it, though, I got very excited
Speaker 3: by it, by the themes, by the characters, by the setting,
Speaker 3: by the plot as well, and decided to turn into
Speaker 3: a novel. So that was a quick, short lived idea.
Speaker 3: But I used that initial conception of this is the
Speaker 3: only way to make a living now for a guy
Speaker 3: whos trying to support a family as one of the
Speaker 3: major themes of the book that Stephen is now a
Speaker 3: failing novelist who's financially dependent on his wife, who can't
Speaker 3: make much money as a writer anymore. This undergirds all
Speaker 3: his anxieties pretty much.
Speaker 1: As a writer. Is that kind of rewarding to start
Speaker 1: out with a shorter mission and just be like, Wow,
Speaker 1: I'm just really loving this and I'm going to run
Speaker 1: with it.
Speaker 3: It is when it works out well. If it doesn't
Speaker 3: work out well, quite maybe I should have kept at
Speaker 3: that short level.
Speaker 2: You know it. We're approaching this as broadcasters, as reporters,
Speaker 2: and I couldn't help but notice in this book, in
Speaker 2: some of your other books, I'm not going to again
Speaker 2: not going to give anything away, but you think people
Speaker 2: within a profession, I'll just go ahead and say it,
Speaker 2: like an NYPD detective's bureau of a prosecutor in the
Speaker 2: Bronx who you've leaned on in the past, and it's
Speaker 2: almost like you reported out certain parts of this book
Speaker 2: by making sure that it works in terms of like
Speaker 2: if somebody in a profession, in a legal profession, were
Speaker 2: to read it, they would say, Okay, wait a second,
Speaker 2: that's how things would actually unfold. Can you talk about
Speaker 2: not the creative process, but the actual reporting process in.
Speaker 3: This Absolutely, I'm not a criminologist. I have no police background,
Speaker 3: as you might be surprised to find out. So I
Speaker 3: have these two friends, a detective and an assistant DA.
Speaker 3: I feel like the one detective and one assistant DA
Speaker 3: who are both avid readers of literary fiction. So it's
Speaker 3: great to have them in my back pocket. They helped
Speaker 3: me a lot with The Winner as well. There's a
Speaker 3: crime in that too, and I wouldn't know the first
Speaker 3: thing about what police do, what lawyers do. You get
Speaker 3: pick up some things from life from watching enough courtroom
Speaker 3: thrillers and so on, but it helps to have people
Speaker 3: were experts, and not only that, they've helped me come
Speaker 3: up with plot turns for both these books. The ending
Speaker 3: of The Winner was completely invented by my DA friend
Speaker 3: who knew about this specific thing. I won't spoil it
Speaker 3: for your viewers that not many peele knew about which
Speaker 3: he gave to me as this is a great twist
Speaker 3: for the ending. That is even a lot of cops
Speaker 3: don't know about it.
Speaker 2: That's pretty cool.
Speaker 1: And I'm not sure if I've got getting this right.
Speaker 1: But I thought I had heard on a podcast too
Speaker 1: that the ending for this book you were planning to
Speaker 1: go one way and then you went to it was
Speaker 1: it a school event or something, and actually talked to
Speaker 1: a father at a school event who kind of talked
Speaker 1: with you about some stuff and kind of helped shape you.
Speaker 3: Was was a little bit quieter and subtler, and i'd
Speaker 3: been working on it. I kind of knew something was wrong.
Speaker 3: I went to my daughter's preschool graduation.
Speaker 1: Party, which you love to do, right, which.
Speaker 3: I'm always up for going to party.
Speaker 2: Week We've all been there.
Speaker 3: It was at the club as the after party we
Speaker 3: were I sunging to another dad there. He works for
Speaker 3: a company. I can't say what it is because it'll
Speaker 3: spoil the last sentence of this book has a twist
Speaker 3: in it, so I can't say what he works for.
Speaker 3: But we talked for a while. I generally interested in
Speaker 3: people's jobs and asked what they do. The Next day,
Speaker 3: my wife and I were talking about the book, and
Speaker 3: she said, I think you need something else here at
Speaker 3: the ending, but I don't know what, but it's currently
Speaker 3: not working. And I realized what this guy does for
Speaker 3: a living could play a big factor in that, and
Speaker 3: I ended up rewriting it based on that.
Speaker 2: Okay, so go ahead. CO.
Speaker 1: Do you and your wife often talk? You're both writers? Like?
Speaker 1: Do you you both work from home? Like? Do you
Speaker 1: often kind of bounce off of each other?
Speaker 3: We do. Literally, we live in a small apartment and
Speaker 3: we are constantly in each other's way. But her name
Speaker 3: is Kate great Head. She's a wonderful writer to her
Speaker 3: last book is called The Book of George. I'd say
Speaker 3: we're probably each other's first and last readers. I think
Speaker 3: first and last line of defense. Plenty of discussion while
Speaker 3: we're in the midst of things. Not the kind of
Speaker 3: couple where we show each other every single page we
Speaker 3: write that night. But good to have someone in your
Speaker 3: own field who you can talk with about your own work,
Speaker 3: but also about broader literature and movies and so on.
Speaker 2: How much does a draft stay well, like, stay consistent.
Speaker 2: I know it's you know, dependent on the draft, but this,
Speaker 2: for example, the a Pair, which is coming out tomorrow.
Speaker 2: Stay consistent between first and last draft.
Speaker 3: The spine stay is consistent the first I've written this
Speaker 3: and the last book very quickly the first draft. My
Speaker 3: new method is write it as fast as possible, a
Speaker 3: blitz like pace, to slightly match the pace of the
Speaker 3: reading experience. I want to write books that are page turners,
Speaker 3: that are quick read that people tend to finish it
Speaker 3: in one or two sittings. So I wrote them so quickly.
Speaker 3: They're necessarily short too because of that, So the revision
Speaker 3: process tends to flesh it out and deepen things. You've
Speaker 3: get ideas like that ending twist. Plenty of other backstory
Speaker 3: and other elements of character and psychology and narrative end
Speaker 3: up coming into.
Speaker 2: We're speaking with Teddy Wayne. He's a novelist, he's an author,
Speaker 2: he is a screenwriter his new book, The au Pair.
Speaker 2: I want to talk a little bit about some themes
Speaker 2: that have come up in your work in the past.
Speaker 2: One of them is technology. And again I'm not going
Speaker 2: to give anything away, but technology features prominently in two
Speaker 2: in this book and also in another book, and I'm
Speaker 2: just wondering the world that we live in today. You
Speaker 2: talked earlier about how we're reading less so and buying
Speaker 2: fewer books. Perhaps some of that time is being taken
Speaker 2: up by us being addicted to our phones and information
Speaker 2: coming at us from every different angle, where we're kind
Speaker 2: of measuring everything too. I'm just wondering how you view technology.
Speaker 3: I'd say all of it's being taken up by that.
Speaker 3: I think that's the main difference between now in nineteen fifty, certainly,
Speaker 3: but even two thousand and three.
Speaker 2: Let's say.
Speaker 3: I'm susceptible as anyone else. I spend a lot of
Speaker 3: time on my phone. I'm not proud of it. I
Speaker 3: don't like what it does to me. I can't resist
Speaker 3: the lore of a glowing device. It has access to
Speaker 3: everything in the world ever made much of it, bright
Speaker 3: and shiny and video and visual. So I understand why
Speaker 3: people are drawn to these things. I do my best
Speaker 3: to have my children resist it, but there's only so
Speaker 3: much you can do with it, and it's certainly leading
Speaker 3: to the erosion of my industry as a writer. But
Speaker 3: it's not doing great things for most people's characters and personalities.
Speaker 3: I'd say, what.
Speaker 1: Do you hope when somebody reads your book like they
Speaker 1: walk away? With because I do feel like there's messages
Speaker 1: about society in there, and I think I mentioned earlier
Speaker 1: like the transactions that we see in our economy, the
Speaker 1: power structure, whether you see it right off, there's just
Speaker 1: always someone that can be above someone in positions. But
Speaker 1: it's a part of a lot of your books. Well.
Speaker 3: First, I'm trying to entertain people and to write something
Speaker 3: that will make them put down the phone or their
Speaker 3: laptop and just read a book. Secondly, I think art
Speaker 3: can serve to essential purposes. It can cover the disturbed
Speaker 3: or disturb the comfortable. Coverting the disturbed is a great thing,
Speaker 3: it's not really what I do. I'm in the business
Speaker 3: of disturbing the comfortable, specifically the probably upper middle class
Speaker 3: professional class that might buy hardcover novel and have time
Speaker 3: to read it on the beach, say, or on their vacation,
Speaker 3: and an attempt to make them look around their environment
Speaker 3: look at themselves with new eyes in a way that
Speaker 3: I think fiction can often be anesthetizing or anodyne and
Speaker 3: make us feel good about where we are, and I
Speaker 3: am about ourselves, and there's nothing wrong with that again, but
Speaker 3: I'm more interested in making people question themselves.
Speaker 1: In other worlds and other works of art, often like
Speaker 1: movies or something like the Anatomy of Fault Right that
Speaker 1: inspired this. I mean, you are inspired by other works
Speaker 1: that are out there.
Speaker 3: You have to be. It would be strange to be
Speaker 3: closed off by that. I've heard of writers who say
Speaker 3: they don't want to read other novels of their fiction
Speaker 3: while they're writing. I don't know how you would do that,
Speaker 3: but I'm always looking for what might rub off on me.
Speaker 3: I think it's important to have a bit of a
Speaker 3: magpie sensibility to pick things from anywhere, whether it's another
Speaker 3: novel it's the obvious place, but film, music, and then
Speaker 3: of course real life and little moments from real life.
Speaker 2: One of I think was Capitolia. First it was novel,
Speaker 2: so it's a twenty ten novel. It tells a story
Speaker 2: of this young immigrant from Qatar. It's actually very bloomberg like,
Speaker 2: you know, he comes and you know it works on
Speaker 2: Wall Street. He creates this algorithm to trade oil that
Speaker 2: ends up being really successful. There's a character in there
Speaker 2: who runs the fund that he works for, builds this
Speaker 2: relationship with him, and he goes and visits him on
Speaker 2: his estate in Connecticut, and their helicopters involved in lots
Speaker 2: and lots of money. Was there a specific individual like
Speaker 2: the hedge fund manager you modeled that person off of.
Speaker 3: Not hedge fund. I think each book of mine is
Speaker 3: an attempt to be some kind of diagnostic assessment of
Speaker 3: America at the time it was either written in end
Speaker 3: or the time of Portrays.
Speaker 2: Then this is post financial crisis, but it takes place
Speaker 2: pre nine to eleven.
Speaker 3: Takes place in nineteen ninety nine, so it but it's
Speaker 3: meant to be, in its own way, a kind of
Speaker 3: post nine to eleven novel about the nine to eleven world,
Speaker 3: even though it's all set before that. So that book
Speaker 3: was again as you pointed out, he develops an algorithm
Speaker 3: that uses news articles. Part it's been a while since
Speaker 3: I read it or thought about it uses news articles
Speaker 3: and algorithmically sifts them to predict oil futures. It felt
Speaker 3: like a kind of metaphor to me of let's say,
Speaker 3: two thousand and three to two thousand and whatever US
Speaker 3: foreign policy of some kind of exploitative oil ill acquisition
Speaker 3: and profiteering from Iraq. So that guy was not modeled
Speaker 3: off a specific individual. As more thinking about the Dick
Speaker 3: Cheney style of foreign imperialism.
Speaker 1: All right, so I got to ask, I mean, did
Speaker 1: you have an Norwegian or pair just kids Swedish?
Speaker 3: We've never, You've not even had a nanny or we
Speaker 3: rarely even get babysitters, to be honest, So it's all
Speaker 3: all invented.
Speaker 1: Writer's block. It seems like there's a theme often where
Speaker 1: you have a writer or somebody who meets somebody, whether
Speaker 1: it's apartment or this book, where somebody who isn't necessarily
Speaker 1: a writer by training or something can write. So naturally,
Speaker 1: do you have writer's block a lot? Or like? Why
Speaker 1: is that a fun theme for you?
Speaker 3: So I have a strange situation of once I get started,
Speaker 3: I can't stop, and I'm very excited to write, and
Speaker 3: there's no problems. It's between projects that I think I'll
Speaker 3: always I always fear I'll never come up with another
Speaker 3: idea or another idea what're pursuing?
Speaker 1: Get it?
Speaker 3: And that is a probably chronic life flow anxiety that
Speaker 3: I'll be afflicted with forever. Invariably, something pops up and
Speaker 3: I get an idea and I run with it. But
Speaker 3: there's often a several month gap between the end of
Speaker 3: one project and they start a new one where I
Speaker 3: do feel that sense of a block and that might
Speaker 3: inform these characters.
Speaker 2: Is that where you feel you are right now? Or
Speaker 2: do you feel like you have with this new book
Speaker 2: coming out that you worked you know has been quite
Speaker 2: a while in the making. Are you ready to start
Speaker 2: a new one.
Speaker 3: I'm in the midst of working on one, so I'm
Speaker 3: good for now. But when this is over, I still
Speaker 3: feel like what's left?
Speaker 1: All right? So the book is out tomorrow tomorrow A
Speaker 1: teaser we don't want to give it away thirty forty
Speaker 1: seconds for those.
Speaker 3: Who might be listening of what it's about. Yeah, failing
Speaker 3: middle aged Brooklyn novelist hires an o pair twenty four
Speaker 3: year old original pair who upends his life and bad
Speaker 3: things happen.
Speaker 1: All right, summer read as we kick off the summer.
Speaker 2: Officially, and it already has been old to like a
Speaker 2: has it been sold to?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 2: Who is it? Who bought it for a streaming rights
Speaker 2: or season?
Speaker 3: A big production company? They do? I think severans and
Speaker 3: things like that.
Speaker 2: So would it be a series versus a one off film? Okay?
Speaker 2: All right, well, congratulations, thank you, thanks all right for
Speaker 2: joining us.
Speaker 1: I'm just kidding. Good luck with it. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: This was really fun. We really enjoyed it. Teddy Wayne
Speaker 1: of course joining us. The book is the All pair. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and there's lots of books and you've read them all.
Speaker 2: I've read all seven and I will read the eighth one.