Now, if you’re thinking this book is too far out for you, think again. Uber-talented TV producer David E. Kelley loved Rufi’s novel and is turning it into an 8-part Apple TV series starring Elle Fanning as Margo, Michelle Feiffer as Margo’s mom, Nick Otterman as Jinx, Thaddea Graham as Margo’s flat-mate Suzie and Nicole Kidman in an undisclosed role. The dream team. p.s. Elle Fanning narrates the Audible.

Below is an edited, abbreviated Q&A with Rufi. You can listen to our entire chat here on Elena Meets the Author, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Rufi, hello. You write about so many serious, often dark issues like unemployment, desperation, infidelity, sex work, shame, pro wrestling, opiate addiction, religious zealotry, white trash, the impossible choices young mothers face. Can you tell us how humor makes difficult topics not just palatable, but even enjoyable?

Comedy is a great way of leavening a work so that you can talk about these dark issues without it becoming too much of a bummer or making you want to set the book down.

But I also think that the times I’ve laughed the hardest in my life have usually been in a hospital or a mortuary, like, there’s nothing like the truly terrible moments in life to give you the giggles. I think that either life strikes you as funny or not. In this story, I don’t know that I was even thinking that it was going to be so dark.

What inspired this story?

It started off with this really, simple thought experiment. I was seeing the movie Wonder Woman with my mom at the movie theatre. We really liked it, but we both agreed we were much more interested in the island of the Amazons than we were in Wonder Woman herself. We didn’t like Wonder Woman.

She was cold and virginal. Why can’t there ever be a female superhero who fucks? And who’s comfortable with sex. Even Black Widow, she’s sexual, but she’s so tortured by it. Why can’t there be a female superhero who is comfortable with her sexuality?

And then I got this weird idea of taking the two ways that our culture’s messed up about women, the Madonna-whore complex, and what if I made a character who was both a Madonna and a whore? Good at both and there being no conflict.

How could I write such a character? I thought I’d never be able to do it. There’s all this cultural stigma against sex work and there’s this tendency to put mothers on such a pedestal and judge them so harshly over things like using formula or what sleep training method they use.

I mean, we castigate women for nothing. So, I was like, how would I ever get a reader to sign on to this character? And then during the pandemic, there were some standup comedians that I followed on Twitter, and as their ability to perform standup evaporated overnight, they were scrambling to figure out how to support themselves and they started OnlyFans accounts.

I was watching them live tweet their experience. And I noticed that the conversations around OnlyFans were a little bit different than conversations around other forms of sex work or sex adjacent work. I think partially because women of our generation, most of us have taken nudes for a partner at some point. So, it’s no longer this idea of you going to a sketchy photographer’s house and putting yourself in danger to take boudoir photographs. It’s like you take a picture of your boobs on the phone all the time, so that’s not the scary part. We’ve all also sold something online, so that’s not really that intimidating.

And suddenly, you’re in charge. You know, there’s no creepy producer who’s making you do things you don’t want to do. You have complete creative control. Then what really is the problem with it?  And I thought, oh, this is the paradigm where people would be more willing to have the conversation without it suddenly getting collapsed into black and white.

I listened to an interview where you talked about how during COVID, waitresses were unemployed, men were working from home and Only Fans subscriptions shot up

 I think it went from 20 million users to 120 million users in that first year of the quarantine. There’s a large group of people participating in the OnlyFans economy. And it’s one of the things that weirdly makes me hopeful. I know that there’s been a lot of questions whether these young women understand the repercussions? Will it be difficult for them to find employment in the future? And I feel like there’s so many of them (on OnlyFans) at this point that it seems that it’s going to be absurd to not hire someone for a job because they used to have an OnlyFans account. I hope that that’s the way the culture is trending.

Margot’s love interest, JB, asks her, ‘When you fall in love with a book, is it the character or the author you’re falling in love with?’ What do you think?

 I think for me as a very lonely, chubby child who fell in love with books, communing with those other minds and feeling a ripple of intelligence behind a story offered me a kind of intimacy that really wasn’t available in other aspects of my life.

Like you never can really know a writer. You feel like you do. You think, ‘Oh, I’ve read every single one of your books.They’re a huge part of my own mental imaginative landscape, but you still don’t know that person. You could, in fact, meet a writer you admire and then discover you don’t like them at all, that they’re a terrible person or they’re mean, or whatever.

There’s all this distance (when you read a book) that enables something truly intimate to happen, experiencing a story or a whole world or a series of people that are all created by one mind. And I think there’s something fundamentally communicative in art that is about connection.

Elena: When people read fiction they’re living in a fantasy world, a bit like Margo’s subscribers.

I think that we have a really strong drive towards the fantastical. We are naturally drawn to it and also suspicious of the part of ourselves that likes it.

And so, in some ways, I think this book is a a defence of lying. You know, it’s not all bad. Don’t get too worried about lying. Sometimes lying is good.

Margo is selling a fantasy, and she’s aware of what her fans think about her. She thinks that they are treating her like a little Tamagotchi, like a little tiny woman that lives in their phone and they can send her dollars and then she’ll do what they say.

There is a way in which fiction is wish fulfilment. To keep reading, you have to prefer the book to real life. You watch a Shakespeare play and you’re escaping. There is a way in which a novel is always a fantasy in the same way that whatever a sex worker is portraying is a fantasy in the same way that even the kinds of physiques that wrestlers are showing you, the kind of strength…I mean, you don’t do a backflip in the middle of a real fight. But it’s this fantasy of what if fighting were beautiful.

Can you talk about the research you did for this book?

Sure, so there were two main arms of the research. One is the wrestling research, and one is the OnlyFans research.  I’m going to talk about the wrestling first, because I’m sure people are more interested in the OnlyFans, so then we can end on the exciting OnlyFans research.

Regarding the wrestling research, I didn’t even know wrestling was going to be part of this book. I just happened to get obsessed with pro wrestling at the same time (as I was writing the novel). And I remember walking the dogs with my mom and I was telling her how wrestling has this rich literary tradition where almost every wrestler of note has one, if not multiple, published memoirs.

And she (said), if only there was some way that you could work this into your book so I wouldn’t have to hear about it quite so much.

And so, I thought, I don’t want Margo to become a wrestler, but what about her dad? It would give us a way of understanding people making a living by taking risks with their body. I felt like the parallels to sex work were close enough.

For wrestling research, I did a ton of reading, a ton of listening to podcasts, a ton of watching summaries of matches in the 90’s.

And then for OnlyFans I really wanted to get it right. I’m very spoiled as a fiction writer because most people want to talk about their jobs. But this was not the case with OnlyFans. Everyone was sliding into their DMs. OnlyFans models don’t have emails posted anywhere. They don’t have a webpage. They’re trying to not let people have access to them because they’re scary people out there who want to kill them. And certainly, they’re getting way too many DMs to personally monitor that on a platform like Instagram or Twitter.

So, I made an OnlyFans account, and I would send a message with a $50 tip saying I’m a novelist, I promise, an actual real one. Here’s my name and names of books I’ve written. I’m writing a novel that has a character who is doing an OnlyFans account. I really want to portray sex work as work and not have it be exploitative. I really want to get the details right.

I would love to hear about your experience. I’m willing to pay you this much per question blah blah blah. And even with financial incentives, it was not like people were lining up to talk to me about this. There was a lot of hesitancy. Any question that veered towards the personal, they’d be like, I don’t feel comfortable talking about that. Super private, super guarded. And that was kind of an education in and of itself, in terms of understanding just how bombarded they are with people trying to get at them. People trying to get under the facade and pry off their mask and get something from them.

I did ultimately find a couple of models who were willing to answer questions more in depth. I wanted to keep the book focused on that early period of starting an account, because I really wasn’t sure what happens to you psychologically if you do this work for years.

I think it wears on you in really specific, unique ways, and I did not have somebody who was willing to take me into that level of confidence where I felt like I could understand and do it any justice.

I got lucky and wound up finding an OnlyFans model who had once also worked in publishing and was willing to do a full manuscript read. And that was insanely valuable.

 I read that you grew up with a single mother, not really knowing your own father. How much did you draw on personal experience for this book?

 My mom has a really different personality than (Margo’s mother) Cheyenne and a really different life background. My mother was an actress and she has a master’s degree in theatre, and she has a whole different vibe.

But there is a dynamic between a single mom and an only child, where you’re kind of buddies. And you go on little adventures together. Me and my mom did a lot of road trips, and we had a lot of little rituals that our idiosyncratic household made together.

Like the same way in the book that they did foot peels on Thanksgiving. And now Margo’s thinking about Kenny (Cheyenne’s boyfriend) joining the family and Margo’s thinking what’s going to happen to all our weird little just me and mom rituals?

I think that I didn’t understand how much my own mother loved me until I had children. I don’t think you can really conceive of how encompassing a mother’s love is until you have your own babies and then you’re like, oh, she would have died for me. Like, it wasn’t just that she made me sandwiches. She would have beaten a dog to death with a shovel to save me.

You understand how much labor it takes to raise a child. How many hours of wiping the butts, and the snots, and making the food and how tiring it was and how lonely it probably was for her.

So, I did a lot of thinking along those lines about my own mother when I had children.  I tried to give Margo a lens, understanding her mom anew through having her own child.

What prevailing message would you like readers to take away from this book?

I’m always a little bit suspicious of messages, and I do try to not have one. The one thing I knew I wanted the reader to feel was what I had in mind with movies like Legally Blonde.

I wanted them to feel like she kicked ass at the end. I wanted readers to feel like their life was their own and they got to do with it what they wanted. And that they could be like Margo and build any kind of life that they wanted according to their rules. And they don’t have to please anybody. I wanted it to have that feeling of violent hopefulness,

 Well, mission accomplished. Thank you so much. That’s all my questions.

 Thank you very much, Elena.

November, 2024

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I hadn’t realized how bright, focused, complicated and worldly Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onassis was until I read bestselling author Dawn Tripp’s latest novel  Jackie. Grounded in historical research, Dawn captures the essence of the woman behind the myth, the enigma that was Jackie.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. I think it’s my favorite book this year, and I only recommend books I really like. It’s beautifully written, a captivating read, even the second time around. The Washington Post said, “To write a book on someone who has already been relentlessly scrutinized is a daring enterprise.” And all I can say is, thank you Dawn for daring. Below is our Q&A which has been edited for clarity and brevity. You can listen to the full episode on Elena Meets the Author here or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Dawn: Thank you so much for having me here. I’m thrilled to be here.

Elena: I’m so excited to have you here.  Jackie died 30 years ago this year. In your book you have a quote from historian E.L. Doctorow,

“The historian will tell you what happened. And the novelist will tell you what it felt like.” Later in your excellent novel, you write: “No one wants to know the real story, the private story, the evolution of a woman’s interior life… They tell us the story of what happened to her. And in the world’s eyes, usually what happened to a woman is men.”

Dawn, I’d love to hear how you first realized there was so much more to Jackie than meets the eye.

 It was actually five years before I started working on this book. My son had brought home The Best Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis by Caroline Kennedy for me to read aloud to my sons at bed-time.  I read from the introduction which had been written by Caroline. And while I’d known that Jackie had a passion for books, I’d never considered her mind, her psyche, her emotional life as a reader.

In Caroline’s introduction she talked about how books had been central to her mother’s childhood, and how she ensured that books were central to Caroline’s childhood. And she talked about how both JFK and Jackie shared an intimate love of books, and the power of stories, and how Jackie would share poems with Jack, and he would integrate them into his speeches. He would ask Jackie for her perspective on documents written in French.

At the end of the introduction Caroline reflected on how her parents, her brother and she had faith in the power of ideas and how the words we use to describe our ideas is the greatest power we have.

I remember reading that sentence and it was like a bolt of lightning. I thought, who was she? I thought there never has been a narrative built around this extraordinary woman’s intellect. She was so smart. She had a passion for literature, art, history, travel and not travel for luxury, but travel to learn about other cultures’ traditions and histories.

One of the things I loved about your book was not just getting to know and admire Jackie, but learning about the love story between her and Jack. 

That was a dimension of their story that I wasn’t expecting to find. In the ten years that it took to research and write this book, that was the thing that surprised me the most. They were in love. I think we sometimes forget just how young they were. It was a young, complicated marriage.

I was curious about why she was drawn to him. She knew about his reputation as a womanizer. She was drawn to his mind, how smart he was, how he was constantly asking questions. She was drawn to his vulnerability, the fact that he loved to read.

I find the way she reacted to JFK’s affairs fascinating. She was so strong and tactical. One time when JFK strayed after the children were born she told him, ‘you know, your children might hear about this. They’re going to look at you differently.’ And he ended that liaison immediately. 

Yes, when his affairs became more public, she realized how the public would react and how impactful that would be to her, to someone who was so private. As she became more aware of what was going on, she became more uncompromising. I think that can happen to women over time. Actually, that doesn’t work anymore. That behavior has to stop.

I go to events and one of the questions I get asked again and again is what about Jack’s affairs. And yes, they’re in the novel to a certain extent, but that was not what was interesting to me. I feel like we are always talking about the weight of this woman’s life and her choices through the lens of her husband’s affairs. She was so much more interesting, so much more expansive. It was a piece of her life, but it did not circumscribe her life.

Usually, when I finish a book, I’m done. I move on. But with Jackie, I’m still interested in her. I continue to be intrigued by the range and scope of her, not just her mind, but her passion for life. And her respect for the imperfect. We sometimes think of her as so perfect, perfect hair, perfect clothes, perfect everything.

And yet, there’s a great quote from her when she’s reflecting on the photography she did when she was working at the Times Herald. She said the picture is boring if there’s not something imperfect about it. She recognized that sometimes our flaws are where things become revelatory.

Can you tell me about her passion for life?

There’s this phenomenal video of her waterskiing in 1962. She was an incredible water-skier. It’s not just her grace and beauty, but her athleticism. She’s on one ski weaving back and forth. Then there’s another cut where she’s skiing with John Glenn, the astronaut. And a third where she’s skiing holding four-year-old Caroline (who is skiing between her mother’s legs). She wanted to introduce her daughter to the water, the spray, the sun, the light. It just told me so much about who she was as a mother.

I found an image of Jackie swinging Caroline through the surf. Jackie has a white shirt on, Chino pants rolled up. She’s swinging Caroline by the arms through the surf. Her hair is kind of crazy and she’s soaking wet. And she looks so happy, so alive, so free.

And there’s another candid snapshot of her and Jack on a sailboat. They’re scrunched together laughing. Their smiles are so big.

Your book is divided into three parts: Her marriage to Jack, then Ari and then her life as a woman who works because she wants to. Do you think she was happy in that third part of her life?

I do. She had had a lot of loss, but I think in the last two decades of her life she was finally creating a life that was on her own terms. She really loved to work. She loved routine. She was also very grounded in nature. She bought a piece of land on Martha’s Vineyard and laid out the house with a piece of string. She wanted it to be a house the children would want to come home to. She was always close to her children. In one interview she said she often thought it was the best thing she ever did. Her children were at the forefront of her mind and her life and her choices.

Thank you so much!

October 2024

The post Q&A with Dawn Tripp – Jackie appeared first on Elena Bowes.

I know that when I’m meditating, I am a nicer, more present, calmer person. Case in point, I was just nearing the end of a meditation session (ie sitting on a chair with my eyes shut for 20 minutes repeating a mantra that Jillian assigned to me all those years ago) when someone came into the room, ignored my closed eyes and started talking to me. I opened my eyes, greeted him with a smile and answered his questions.

Now, I know me. My typical reaction would be sheer annoyance. “Don’t I ever get a moment to myself?!” But no, I was super patient without trying.

Jillian says that meditation should be effortless, not forced.  If a zillion thoughts are entering my head, that’s fine, that’s natural. In this particular meditation session, I could hear my thirty-year-old son on a work zoom upstairs, and I started reminiscing about his childhood and how long I’ve known him, 30 years, he was such a cute baby. Is that a failed meditation? Not at all. According to Jillian, it’s ok if a zillion thoughts come into my head, let them, but try and return to the mantra. Watch those thoughts like clouds in the sky, register them and then let them float away.

But don’t listen to me, listen to Jillian. She founded the London and New York Meditation Centres with her partner in work and life Michael Miller in 2008.

They offer a myriad of courses on-line and in person, as well as retreats in far-flung locales. They have taught thousands of people how to meditate.I love their free on-line group meditations as a way for me to reconnect and listen to Jillian and Michael wisely answer meditators’ questions. They also have tons of forensic scientific evidence supporting the physical and psychological benefits of meditation. Below is an edited, abbreviated version of our chat. You can listen to the entire conversation on my podcast Elena Meets the Author here or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Elena: Hello Jillian and welcome. In your book you debunk some of the popular myths about meditation. Can you tell us briefly what those are?

I think that’s partly why I wrote the book. More and more people know about meditation, which is great, but with that comes confusion. The thing I hear time and time again is ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that. My mind is crazy busy. I couldn’t sit down and stop thinking.’ But that’s not what we want people to do. Or people say, ‘I don’t have time to meditate.” That was an issue for me when I first started meditating. But what I found is that I actually had more time. I was more focused, more productive. I didn’t have to read that sentence five time before it sank in.

There’s also a myth about meditation being a belief system. We teach people from all walks of life, all faiths. And you don’t have to stop drinking wine, or start drinking kale juice, change your diet in any way.

Elena: Can you tell us about some of the positive effects that meditating can have on people’s lives?

 It’s a long list. Meditation affects every aspect of our mental and physical functioning.  You are resting your system so your body can heal, purify and rebalance. That deep rest means that we can release tiredness and stress. We’re going to be more resilient. And meditating has a big impact on the ageing process. Long-term practitioners are aging more slowly. Vedic mediators have improved memory, learning ability, concentration and focus.

Meditating has a big impact on how we can be there for others. If we go into a relationship and we’re tired and needy, cranky, it’s going to affect that exchange. It’s all about me. But if we go into it, present, listening and feeling good inside, not needy, that has an incredibly uplifting effect on that exchange.

Elena: how do you know when you’re doing it correctly?

That’s a good question because there’s a lot of stuff out there that’s not very effective. Ask yourself is this something you look forward to? Do you enjoy it? Do you find that it’s easy when you do it? Do you feel a difference when you do it? How do you feel if you missed your meditation? That’s the acid test.

Elena: You say in your book that there’s no such thing as a stressful situation, there are only stressful responses to a given situation. Can you explain?

 This is a a very challenging world that we live in. We live in a world undergoing, rapid rates of change. It is only accelerating. What is our capacity to deal with change?  What is our capacity to adapt to new information? That’s what life is asking of you. And when you’re tired, stressed, depleted, you don’t have that bank balance, that reservoir of adaptation energy.

In Vedic Meditation we de-excite. We start to lighten the load. Meditation delivers an antidote to stress by delivering a level of rest that is profound. And when you rest the nervous system, it can come into balance to meet the demands of life by not carrying this legacy of stress. Meditation helps us lose stress faster than we are gaining it. And that puts us way ahead of the game.

Elena: And finally, you talk about how meditation can help the creative process? 

 Vedic meditators report having more clarity, more insight, more lightbulb moments where you get that good idea. The universe is sending you good ideas all the time. The question is are you awake? Can you catch them? When we have all that scattered thinking in our head, it’s hard to get clarity.

So much emphasis in our society is placed on intellectual capability. But all the important decisions you’ve made in your life, the consequential decisions didn’t come from working it out in our head. It’s our ability to tune into our intuition. I did an interview once and someone asked me what was the most important thing that I have gained from meditation. And I said, my ability to trust myself, that ability to turn down the volume, go inward and access that feeling, that sixth sense, that intuition about how I’m going to decide what I’m going to do in any aspect of my day.

Thank you so much Jillian. I think a lot of people will find our conversation helpful.

October, 2024

The post Q&A with Jillian Lavender – Why Meditate? Because it works. appeared first on Elena Bowes.