Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode. at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see a a guest.
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Mindy: We're here with Ashley Audrain whose first novel, The Push, released earlier this month. It is up my alley because it covers something that I think a lot of people don't like to talk about. And that is the possibility of a truly bad child. So why don't you tell us a little bit about the book?
Ashley: Sure. Thank you for having me, Mindy. The Push is about a woman named Blythe Connor, and she comes from a history of women who have struggled greatly with motherhood, her own mother and her grandmother in particular. And she's determined that she's going to break the cycle, that she's going to be the warm, present engaged mother that she herself never had. And so she and her husband have a baby named Violet. And it is not long until she starts to realize that there's something wrong with Violet. She is a very aloof child. She's distant and not attached, and she's quite an angry little girl. And she soon starts to demonstrate some malicious behavior towards other Children. And the problem, of course, is that her husband cannot see in their daughter what she sees. He thinks this is very much a result of Blythe’s maternal anxiety, and you know the fear that she's carried about motherhood for so long and they, you know, sort of try to move on and have another baby. And in that new baby named Sam, Blythe finds that maternal connection she had always hoped for until something goes terribly wrong in the family and they are forced to really take a look at who their daughter is and who Blythe herself is and what has happened. And the family unravels from there.
Mindy: So much going on there. I love that you made the decision To make the bad child a female.
Ashley: Yeah, that's interesting. No one has said that to me yet. Blythe is raising a daughter who she hopes is going to be the better, kind of, reflection of the women that she comes from. It was important to me to sort of capture these four generations of women. So we go back to the grandmother, the mother Blythe herself, and now this fourth generation in Violet. And I really wanted to explore that idea of, you know, this chain of motherhood that we come from, what we as women, sort of the women that recreate, and the females that we create in the children we have. What we can't help but pass along to them. What we try to pass along to them. Explore that kind of balance between what is innate in us, totally innate in us as women. And what is, you know, the learned behavior that we have as women when it comes to, especially when it comes to kind of our maternal behaviors.
Mindy: It's such a great question and so interesting to me personally. As a joke, but also very true - my mother is extraordinarily kind and sweet. Never says a bad thing about anyone. For an example. Their house was broken into maybe two years ago, and my mom came home, discovered it and didn't call the cops because she and I quote, “did not want anyone to get into trouble.” That's my mother.
Ashley: Aw, that's so sweet.
Mindy: Oh, yeah, just well, It's okay, I'll clean it up. That is the hereditary line, and it's very true, and I was fortunate enough to know my great grandmother, that really kind of conservative, “I don't want to cause a problem or get in your way or be too loud. I'll just clean up this mess” for a woman, really came down very strongly through all three generations. And then I showed up. And I can tell you that my mother... I'm 42 and my mother repeatedly has told me she just keeps wishing that someday I'll be nicer and I'm like mom, it's I'm 42.
Ashley: So funny. And also that expectation and pressure to be nice as women. I mean, we get it all the time.
Mindy: Yeah, we certainly do. Another point I want to bring up your using a female child to be an aggressor. I really like it. I really like it because when we see, when we notice-in some circles, obviously it is changing and thank goodness - but when we see aggressive behavior, they're not even necessarily aggressive. Sometimes just strong qualities of resistance, defiance, things like this in a female child. It gets translated and magnified in our minds simply because it's a female enacting it. We are immediately like No, no, no, no, You can't act that way. It doesn't simply boil down to the “boys will be boys” like It is a true cultural thing that when we see a female speaking up speaking out, there's automatically a problem. She doesn't have to be mean or aggressive. She's perceived that way. So does that come into the book at all? Or are you focusing more on that maternal line because I think it's just fascinating with the- as you were saying - the chain of motherhood because it is strong and it is real.
Ashley: It really is. And yeah, it's interesting. There are moments Violet, the young girl has aggressions towards other Children and those Children that she treats that way are boys. But it's this example of this girl you know, doing these things to these boys. And there are some conversations that I capture in the book where her husband, Fox, speaks of their daughter and sort of, you know, the ways that we tend to learn how to speak about little girls. You know what the Mother in Law's sort of does the same thing, and Blythe sees her daughter differently, but she doesn't conform as much to that sort of, You know, - there's nothing wrong with her. She's just this sweet little girl like other people in the book do.
And there's also, you know, some questions with her or conversations with, her preschool teacher and whatnot about the kind of child she is. I'm or was sort of focused on that idea of motherhood and sort of what we passed down as women and, you know, it's interesting. I think you know the relationship between a mother and daughter is just such an interesting one to me because I obviously, because I am a woman but even even more interesting than sort of the relationship between a mother and son. It is, I think, the most complex, often the most emotional relationship that we can have in our lives. And, you know, we look at our mothers, and I think you just spoke perfectly to this. But, you know, we see things in our own mothers sometimes that we don't see in ourselves, or we do see in ourselves whether we like to or not. But I think we're always quite conscious of it, like we're all quite, I think conscious of Are we being like our mother right now? And it's almost sort of become an insult, you know, for someone to say, Oh, you're being just like your mom. That's so interesting to me that we speak that way about how we think of our mothers.
And the other thing about that I kinda wanted to explore here, and that's really interesting to me is, I think, as daughters, you know, we think we really know our mothers so well, like we really feel like we completely understand them. We are so close to them, you know, we kind of know them inside out. Many of us and speaking, you know, broadly, we didn't even know who our mothers were as women before they had Children. We do understand and see our mothers through such a narrow lens when you really think about it. And so I like that idea of, you know, exploring this part of your mother that you can't quite understand and the parts of her identity that you can't quite understand because you weren't there for them. You didn't witness them. You don't know them. All you get is that woman as mother. I wanted to explore that by looking at kind of the back stories of, like mother and her grandmother as well.
Mindy: I think it's so true we do view our mothers Only through that very narrow scope of motherhood, and we don't think of them as actually women, I think very often. And I think that's particularly damaging because I mean, it is something that we say often as teenagers will be like, Oh, you know, you just don't understand me? Um, of course they do. Of course they do, because they were teenagers once too. And of course, that's true across the gender spectrum. But I think particularly for girls and especially like my generation. And I think probably yours as Well, our mothers are probably more in that mold of - well, at least where I'm from because I live rurally - a little more in that mold of what a woman was supposed to be in an old-fashioned conservative sense. So it's hard to think of them as being… my mom grew up in the sixties, right? She can drink like a fish, you know. And that's something that when I figured this out, like in my twenties, that my mother has a higher alcohol tolerance than I do, I was just like, Wait, what?
One of the things, moments in life that I enjoy very, very much are those very brief, very quick moments when you spot someone that you know, like in a crowd or somewhere you don't expect to see them, and your brain has not processed the recognition yet. They're just processing person. And you see this person in this case, my mother, in a different manner simply because you haven't identified them as mom yet. I've had that experience multiple times. You know what those moments are like for anybody, But I had an experience this past fall showing up To a sports event for my nephew, a cross country race. I didn't know that my parents were coming. Because of COVID, the attendance was, you know, limited and I hadn't spoken to them. And I was walking up to the gate and I'm just looking at people and and there's a woman like waiting, leaning against the fence, just waiting, obviously to meet someone. And you know, she's older, but I just like, glance at this woman. I'm like, Wow, that's a very good looking older woman. She’s really beautiful.
And I was walking with a person. I had just begun dating somewhat recently at that point, and he was like, Oh, hey, isn't that your mom? And I was like, Oh my God, that is my mom. And it was just this moment. It was like my mom is very, very pretty. And I just had I love that experience of seeing her just as a person.
Ashley: Oh, I love it. That's such a good example. That is a really good example. Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. And I've had that moment too. I totally had that kind of moment with my own mother. And there's a, you know, a couple of scenes in the book. I mean, maybe at least one scene that kind of captures this, but that idea of - I don't know if you experienced this when you were younger, but you would be, you know, a child and you would go to bed. You'd be like, sent for bedtime and then your parents would have friends over like there would be something social happening in their life. And I can totally remember that feeling of, you know, being in bed and kind of falling, trying to fall asleep and knowing that my parents were like having this sort of experience downstairs that was social with other adults. And their voices changing and their conversation style changing and that being like... feeling very shocking and feeling very intriguing. It's uncomfortable, I think, as a child sometimes because you feel like that's a different person, downstairs in the kitchen. It's so interesting to me, and I'm sort of a little bit conscious of that now. And I, you know, my oldest kid is five, so you know he's not quite there yet. But I still do kind of catch those moments where I sort of see him kind of standing off to the side, sort of watching me in conversation with somebody, you know, completely out of my mom identity, but in a different identity. And it is such an interesting thing.
Mindy: Your example about adults gathering and the Children being there is very precious, very accurate. I know having those experiences as a child. If I needed something suddenly, like if I wanted to drink or if I wanted to go downstairs and ask if I could have you know, another cookie or whatever, I would hesitate in a way that I never would have if it was just my mom downstairs, because she's not just my mom now, like I'm going down there. I'm intruding on this new person, this different person.
Ashley: I remember that kind of feeling of almost embarrassment. It's funny how visceral that feeling that memory is for both of us. It reminds me of there was this book, It was called Women in Clothes. And I think it came out maybe 2012 or sometime around there, because I remember I had just started working at Penguin when it came out, and it was more of like, an anthology on, like a collection of essays about women writing all kinds of perspectives and stories on articles about their relationship with clothing. And there was one article that really stuck out to me, and I should go back and read it now I haven't read in a long time, but it was a woman talking about how she wanted to go back and look at pictures of what her mother wore before she became a mother. How it gave her a completely different perspective on how she considered her mother at that time. And I thought, That's so interesting because, you know, it may seem like a frivolous thing to be, you know, thinking or talking about clothing. But I mean, clothing is such a huge part of our identity and how we express ourselves. That's also quite interesting, too. Like I think you know, there are all these little sort of artifacts of the way that we kind of see our mother or can understand her.
Mindy: It's very true. And my mother, apparently, this is a story that gets tossed around in the, uh, the family because it is highly amusing, but she had gone to college. Again, we live very rurally. and she went to a tech college, like to become a secretary. She went to Columbus to go like a two year college and right around the time she had left home, apparently there was a woman roughly her age and looks very similar to her working in pornography. And people would notice this and be like Oh, my God, Like she left home and really just cut loose. And apparently my grandma and my grandfather had to have, like, these really uncomfortable conversations. And my mother was just like, That is not me!
Ashley: A real stroke of bad luck. That is very funny. Oh, dear.
Mindy: Also like when my mom told me that story, of course I was older. I was all, Oh my gosh, Ha ha ha. But then I was like, Oh, wait, you do have sex, though.
Ashley: Exactly. That sudden realization
Mindy: Yeah, it was funny. And then shit got real.
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Mindy: So you mentioned working in publishing. I know that you were in the industry for a while before you went to the other side of the desk as an author. So why don't you talk about that and about that transition?
Ashley: Sure. Yeah. So I started my career in PR like working for PR agencies, doing more like consumer marketing. I really liked that. But I did sort of feel this kind of missing connection to, you know, what my passion was, and that was writing and books and reading. And I was very fortunate to have the opportunity To move over to Penguin Canada to work as their publicity director because it could be hard to get a job in publishing. And so I was lucky to get that job. And I really felt like a kid in a candy store when I went into the office every day because, you know, I love doing, you know, marketing and communications and publicity, and that was still my role. But I was surrounded by some of the best authors in the world and books every day. And that's, you know, obviously what we all kind of hope for.
I had been writing a lot leading up to that, weekends and nights. And writing had always been such a big part of my life, and it was, you know, what I had hoped to do. But of course, you know, you have to have a job that pays your bills every day. I did not write much when I worked at Penguin. I kind of just let writing sort of go to the side, and I think it's because when I was in that job, well, first of all, it is very humbling to work in publishing, especially at, you know, one of the best publishers in the world.
But more so, you know, I was doing so much reading at that time, and when you work in publishing, you have to read everything. You have to read the books you're putting out, you know, as a publisher, you're reading competition, you're reading the best sellers, and I read wider than I ever had before, like far more commercial than I had before and also far more literary than I had before. Looking back now, I did not realize this at the time, but looking back Now I can see that that was its own very powerful education in writing, to be reading so voraciously and so widely.
I really loved working at Penguin, but I left in 2015 To go on maternity leave with my son. We're very lucky to have a year maternity leave here in Canada. I guess around like the six month mark or so I started to write again. I just felt this really compelling urge to write about motherhood. And the story was, it really felt urgent to me and I felt that was what I wanted to do with, you know, the precious few hours I had every week. And so it kind of happened from there and I didn't go back to my job, you know, for a couple of reasons. But I really wanted To pursue writing. That sort of was, you know, the end of my time at Penguin as a publicist, but I'm there now as an author, so it kind of comes full circle for sure. So that was sort of how the writing journey for the novel began.
Mindy: I know as an author - I never worked in publishing, previous to being an author. But I've been publishing now since 2013. I work just freelance editing for aspiring writers. I've had a lot of luck with that, especially during quarantine. So many people who had said, Yeah, I want to write a novel just did it, which is wonderful. I have a lot of editorial work come in and it's been such an experience having words just be my entire day and life, where I'm reading other people's words, giving them advice on how to make things better. I'm looking at writing from a completely critical standpoint, like not getting lost in the story or anything of that type, completely deconstructing everything that I'm reading, then moving into creating something of my own and having to turn the critical parts off so that I can just let some flow happen.
Ashley: It’s a completely different mindset.
Mindy: That's right, it’s a completely different interaction with words. Maybe in the evening I’m reading, right? And that kind of stopped. I have to tell you.
Ashley: I hear you. Reading during the pandemic, you know, in this pandemic life that we're still in, I have gone through different relationships with reading as well, times when I just couldn't do it and then times when I needed it. Do you find that your editing work, like your manuscript help for other people, is helping your writing as well?
Mindy: For sure. It's also humbled me incredibly, because I was always very confident in myself and self-assured and verging on being egotistic, because I was in my early twenties. But I really believed at that time in my life that writing was a talent, that it was a gift. That you had it or you didn't. And I wrote and wrote and wrote. I think I had finished at that point, like three novels and, of course, was convinced that they were all Pulitzer worthy.
Then I came home and was not in college anymore. Was married, having no, absolutely zero success with my writing, just rejection after rejection after rejection, just feeling like this undiscovered genius. And it's so interesting to me. Because then, of course, through 10 years of further life experience of improving and improving and learning and accepting criticism, I actually became a good writer. I went back and looked at some of the stuff that I had written early and it was so bad. Like, That's not like mock humility. It’s terrible. And so I bring that to my editing. I mean, don't get me wrong. There are times when I'm editing and I'm just like, Really? This is super basic. You should be able to do this. And then I'm like, But could you, Mindy? Could you?
Ashley: Exactly. Because it really is just about the practice of it. Talent for sure. That is a part of it. But so much of it is the hours, the hours that you spend doing it. Yeah, for sure. I totally get that.
Mindy: Before you left Penguin, when you were so immersed in words and publishing and in that every day truly grind of having a relationship with words of every minute of the day, Were you still attempting to write at that time or had you set that aside?
Ashley: I had really set it aside, and it wasn't so much a conscious choice to do that. It just sort of was the way things happened. Looking back, I think I sort of knew that I had other things to learn, and I think That's why I was so compelled to read so much. I think that's kind of where that came from. Yeah, so I really had kind of put that aside. I mean, I always had kept that dream. I always kind of felt that dream that want to do it. To, you know, to write, but also to get published and that pursuit of it.
I remember before I started working at Penguin, you know, I always had a writing class that I was in. I didn't have any kids. And so I had, you know, all Saturday and all Sunday at that time in my life, kind of to myself until I would sit for eight hours and write. And I was kind of working on, you know, pieces here and there and, you know, testing out ideas for a book and kind of doing assignments for these writing classes that I was in. I loved it. I just loved it so much. And that had really convinced me just of the joy that writing brought to me and how, like, connected I felt to it. It is kind of strange that it sort of fell away when I was, you know, working for those couple years in publishing. But again, kind of in hindsight, I could see that as sort of... It was almost like the other part of my brain was kind of turned on at that time, Um, kind of just absorbing, just learning through seeing how it worked and also just reading, you know, so much more widely.
It didn't surprise me at all when that urge, that kind of rush, to need to write Again came back to me as soon as I left that job. That whole time, the ideas were brewing. Like an urge is the best way to describe it, like just a really creative urge with something to say. It's interesting you hear writers say write this, you know, the story that only you could tell. You have to write what’s kind of burning in you at that moment.
Mindy: A cliche, a piece of writing advice that I hear often that I dislike - even though I think if you have the opportunity, you should take it - but so often I hear writers saying “write every day.” And I think that is just--
Ashley: I hate that, too. Mindy, I'm so glad you said that because that is also my most loathed piece of writing advice is “write every day.” Because I mean of course, if you are in a certain writing routine, of course you're writing every day. I never wrote every day and I still don't. And I never wrote every day then for several reasons and one was because I was a new mom. And that is an impossibility as a new mother. Write Every day? I mean, you are not in the head space to sit down on the computer every day of your life. There's no time. You're exhausted. Personally, I was trying to find just a couple moments in the week that I could write. That was all I could manage.
But I think the other thing is that and I know everyone is so different. But for me, I never wrote every day because I needed time to think. And I needed time to kind of let things percolate. And I definitely thought about the book every day. That I could do. Like I had the energy to think about it. But I didn't always have the energy to sit down and work on it, you know, because I had a newborn. Even that whole first year of his life, you know, I take him for walks and pushing the stroller and going to the swings and nursing at night. And I would constantly take notes, and I would constantly think about it. It wasn't always that I could sit down and you know, up my word count. I don't agree with that advice for everybody. I know people who will say That's the only way I got the book done was to write every day, and you know, that is great, because that works for them. But it's not gonna work for everybody.
Mindy: No. And I think that it raises a bar of exclusivity as well, because there are people that simply cannot write every day. Like you were saying early motherhood, but also people that are working two jobs, people that are single parents, people that are just freaking exhausted at the end of the day. You can't write every day. I could. Technically. I don't want to.
Ashley: I just don't want to. It's not the day.
Mindy: I find so many aspiring writers hearing that advice and just hanging it up because they're like, Well, I can't do that.
Ashley: It feels quite daunting, doesn't it?
Mindy: Yeah, I agree. And I think I see a lot of people having the reaction of, Well, I must not be a writer then. It's like, No, dude, you can not write for six months. You cannot write for six years and then be like, Okay, I'm gonna do it again. That's fine.
Ashley: I totally agree. I totally agree. And I do remember kind of going through a point where I almost like, in those early days, and I was just starting to write where, you know, because that advice is so prevalent. I remember thinking like, I have no chance. Like I have a job.I can't make it the biggest priority in my life.
Mindy: I cringe when I hear it every time I'll contradict people. If I'm on like a panel or something.
Ashley: I should say. I mean, it took me three years to write this book, so I guess that's why I guess it depends.
Mindy: It took me 10 years to get published, so you know everything with a grain of salt. So last thing, why don't you let people know where they can find you online and where they can find your book The Push?
Ashley: Sure, thank you. Well, The Push is out now so you can find it basically anywhere that you prefer, anywhere you like to buy books should be available. And you can find me online on Twitter at @audrain And I'm on Instagram @AshleyAuDrain And I have a website, Ashley Audrain dot com, that I'm updating with event news and that sort of thing. So, yeah, I love to hear from readers, and that's been, that's been a real joy in this process, is just, you know, finally having this book out and just hearing back from people about what they think of the book and what's resonating, and it's been really great.
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