30 Years of Oprah’s Book Club: The Authors Behind the Stories We Love

This special episode of The Oprah Podcast is presented by Audible. So I'm wondering, what does it mean when all of you, as writers, you hit the best sellers list? I'm really, really grateful that readers have embraced my work and that they will follow me anywhere. The opportunity to be a writer is a gift. Oh, yeah. I am living in the whipped cream of my life. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I'm going to take that phrase and may or may or may not give it to you. I've been saying, I've been living my life like it's golden, but I like I'm living in the whipped cream of my life. I love it. Hi, everyone. This is an exciting day on The Oprah Podcast because we're celebrating a milestone that so near and dear to my heart. It is the 30th anniversary of Oprah's Book Club. Now when I was a young girl, books were a lifeline for me and I mean that in a very real sense. They were my friends. They allowed me to feel that I was not alone and also open the window for me to dream about a life that was beyond my grandmother's front porch. And it's been one of my great, great, great joys to be able to create a book club and have it thrive now for three decades with millions of you just reading along with me and millions of books sold and being able to elevate authors that I have wanted to support and that I have loved reading their novels and their nonfiction books. And there is another thing that I'm also really excited about. It's that our partners at Amazon have created a storefront to make it super fast and super easy to find all 124 of my book selections. If you just scan the QR code right there on your screen and it will bring you right to it. So all of you who have read along with me for years, you know that for me writers are my rock stars. So this is my own version of the rock and roll hall of fame gathering. Let me introduce our authors today. President Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal for his empathy and medicine and his renderings of the human drama. The covenant of water was my 101st book club pick by Abraham for Gees. And I chose her novels twice. First I chose the Poison Wood Bible and then demon copperhead for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, Barbara King Solver. And just 21 of my picks have been nonfiction in all these 30 years. But only one finding me finding me was written by an egot that's an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony winner. Hello, Biola Davis. Yes. Oprah. And he is a MacArthur genius grant recipient. Uh-huh. His novel The Emperor of Gladness was my 140th book club choice. Hi there, Ocean Bung. Yeah. And I want to mention a woman who's also Pulitzer Prize winner. I've also chosen her novels twice. I'll have again and tell me everything Elizabeth throughout. I was hoping that Elizabeth could be with us today. But she's a little under the weather. So we're sending you our love, Liz. And I think she is hands down one of the also greatest writers of her generation. So this is a wow moment for me. Thank you. Wow. For us too. Yeah. In my backyard. Thank you. Thank you for being here. So I have to say that it's just a great, I feel like it's a great privilege to be among people who can't use words in the way that you do. I think it's a gift. Like some people can sing and some people can paint and some people have this gift of words. I wonder do you consider it a gift? I think I had to labor at it. I think it wasn't something that just came naturally. Uh-huh. But I think in the reception and overtime have begun to feel that maybe yes, I had an affinity for this and I just didn't know it till later in life. Now when the words come and you've been able to finish the sentence the way you actually want to finish it, does that feel like a gift or does it feel like you work for it or that it came through you somehow that you were? You know, I think when I finally arrive at the finish sentence, it's after many, many iterations. Yeah. But there are definitely moments when I think this couldn't be for me. This came from some part of me that I don't know or call it the muse, call it the right brain. It really seems that it didn't come for me. Really? Barbara, you're nodding. Well, I don't like the word gift. Yeah. Describing our work because a gift is something that lands on your desk, you know. These books did not land on our desks. It's work. It's just like what you do is work. There's, I remember in Alice Walker's The Color Purple, her dedication was, I think all these characters for showing up. You know what? I read that and said, nope. My characters were pulled from the earth, from the air, from my heart. I made these characters once in a while. I will write a sentence and think, wow, that's a good sentence. But most of the time, I write, you know, a first draft that doesn't please me and then 20 more drafts or 30 more drafts, every sentence is, is, is, is rot. Yeah, one of the things that I remembered that we, when we talked about Demon Carpahead, which I do think is just a perfect novel and I think a lot of other people think so too. But you were saying that in the beginning, Demon was too angry and that you had to tone down his anger. When did you realize that he was angry and that that was a problem with the character? First draft. I got to page, I don't know, 100, about page 100 and I just did a, out of curiosity, a word search to see how many f-bombs he had dropped in 100 pages and it was about 175. I thought I couldn't dial that back. Understand, I mean, first you write, first you want to get it on the page, you have what you want to say, you feel the voice, you're, you're channeling the voice but you're also making the voice. But there comes a time when you start thinking about readers and I, you know, at some point early on I realized, I can't, this, this pissed off kid can't be too off-putting. I have to make him lovable. Once I get the reader on his side, he can drop all the f-bombs in once because then the reader will be dropping them with him. Yeah. And so, when did, when, when did you feel sparked to this calling to write? When did you, yes, yes, Barbara? I never thought I could be a writer. For me, books were exactly as you described just now. My friends. You, my hiding place. I could, I had a tree, a willow tree outside, you know, outside on our farm that I could go. Oh, you were one of those guys. And the willow tree. Well, just because, because in the house if I opened a book, then, you know, somebody, my parents or somebody would say, oh, you're not doing anything, um, yeah, you could work. You could come. That happened in my heart, too. I had, as you say, they took me to a world beyond the farm I lived on, beyond the very little town I lived in. They helped me feel connected with other people. You feel so alone with your, with your, with your sadness, your loneliness, your struggles. And then in a novel, you feel other people share those troubles that you're not alone. Yeah. So, um, I loved books. I thought it was amazing what books did for me, but I didn't imagine they were written by ordinary people like me. I never thought I could grow up to be a writer. I lived in a place where nobody was a writer. You had to do practical things where I came from. So, um, I, you know, I studied other thing. I was lucky enough to get to college. Almost nobody I knew got to do that. So I thought, oh, a better study, you know, science. So I can get a job, but I just kept writing because I loved to do it, but it was a secret. I didn't tell anybody. And it's sort of like in my 20s, like my friends outed me, um, and said, you know, we know you're writing poems. You, you started with poetry, you should, yeah, poems and short stories. Short stories. Um, yeah, and I started, you know, sending them off to magazines and, you know, writing came to me. It sort of came and got me at what age? In my late 20s. Got my late. So how about you, Biola? Oh, well, you know, I'm an actor too. Yes. Yeah. Yes, yes. Yes. And the other gig I have words are extremely important too because, um, words are a portal. They're, they're a way into your why. Yes. I find in telling stories, it's like the great Sanford Meisner quote is the most important question an actor can ask is why. Yes. And you do that when, of course, when I wrote my book, the hardest chapter to write was the first chapter. Yeah. Because I always, I had to be curious about me first. So I had to explore my why. And for me, with words, it's an excavation. Yes. It's like, what do I say, especially about myself, what do I say, what do I want to say? And I remember waking up in the middle of the night, three, four o'clock in the morning, not turning on any lights in my house because something would hit me, a memory. You know, the book is my life. And I remember this specifically that a memory, a story hit me. Once again, a story, right? I don't know why of the story, you know, it's just the story. Yeah. So it was a story of my mom and dad fighting and me holding my baby sister in my arms who was a year old and it was extremely violent fight. And I kept thinking, why is this story, why is it keeping, why does it keep knocking on my door? So I wrote it, took me three hours, literally, to write the story. Then I went back and I changed some words and I wrote it again, but changed some words. And I realized the reason why I wrote the story is because I was going through something then, the pandemic, a little depression, a little anxiety. And the reason why I wrote it is because it was a story, the first story that made me feel capable. Oh, but I didn't know that that was the point of the story when you wrote it. You didn't know that. No, I had to keep, you know, like, because at first I was like the actress saying it's going to be so dramatic. Yes. It's going to be a dramatic story, dramatic story until the word came out. I remember the sentence came out that said, you know, something hit me that day. And I'm thinking to myself, I know, what hit you that day? That hit you that day is that I had it in me. That's it. Yeah. And I find it's why I loved when I first started reading Richard Wright. Yeah. Is I find that the simplest words sometimes strike the most powerful effect of opening up a person's life. But I think that's why I love words, too, because that's what you have to have as an actor. You always have to excavate till you get to the truth of the end of the words. In case you all didn't know this already, Violet narrates the audiobook of finding me on Audible and hearing her memoir read by the Violet Davis is something to behold and a whole nother elevated experience. Let's take a listen. The imperfect but blessed sculpture that is Viola is still growing and still being chiseled. My elixir, I'm no longer ashamed of me. I own everything that has ever happened to me. The parts that were a source of shame are actually my warrior fuel. I see people the way they walk, talk, laugh, and grieve and their silence in a way that is hyper focused because of my past. I'm an artist because there's no separation from me and every human being that has passed through the world, including my mom. I have a great deal of compassion for other people, but mostly for myself. That would not be the case if I did not reconcile that little eight-year-old girl and find me. Ah, that's why the novel, it's Reeves like a novel, but that's why there's memoirs called "Finding Me." And did the process of that excavation, that writing actually help you to find you in a way that you had not imagined? Yes, I had to reset. You know, it's like when your phone is messing up and you have to unplug it and turn it off and turn it back on or whatever, I don't know. The thing about it is when you grow up with so much dysfunction and so much poverty, so much of everything, and you know, you meet people in life and everyone in life tells their best story. Come on, let's be honest. Yeah. You know, you feel wrong. I spent too much of my life feeling wrong and then it was during the pandemic and now you're still, you're not running around. And so I always say the two seas in the end, courage, curiosity, and memory. That's what it challenged. I had to go back, I had to go back to the reset. I had to go back to a time when the thing about six-year-old Viola is she never failed herself. She didn't, she didn't know how to. So instead of always trying to heal her, I decided to help her to heal me. So that's why I went back. And I went back to the bad Viola, the person who was called the bad Viola, because I think somewhere in the bad Viola was actually the honest Viola, was actually the truthful Viola. And instead of being so afraid of the fact that she went to the bed and the fact that she wasn't considered pretty, and she was unkempt, and she was growing up in such dysfunction that maybe she had the answer for 54-year-old Viola. Wow. And so it was the curiosity that brought me back. Now I always say with the book that's only 30% of who I am. The rest, there's certain memories that I couldn't bear to share still. And there's certain things that I couldn't remember anyway. And then there were certain things that I remembered wrong. Wow. Wow. So what I had was what I had, and I have to say, the first sentence of the book for me busted it wide open. Wow. The first sentence. I can't say because I remember that first sentence. I remember that first sentence, and I remember it going, wow, and then there were so many after that sucker, mother was my favorite expression. And at eight years old, I used it defiantly. I was a spunky sassy mess, and when I spewed that expression, one hand would be on my hip, my middle finger in vast display, and maybe my tongue would be sticking out. I remember that sentence. I remember it. It's what, I mean, I think it's, you know, I read a lot of books. People always ask me, how do you have time to be so many books, because I don't do a lot of other things. I'm not, you know, consumed by a lot of other things I read, I read, I read, I read. And this is by far the best memoir I've ever, ever read. You did your thing on here. You did it. Our listeners tell us that the podcast is resonating with you, and is serving as a bright spot in your day. That means a lot to me. So, here's the thing, I would really appreciate it if you like and subscribe to the Oprah podcast on YouTube, or wherever you podcast, it's just a quick tap of the subscribe button. And that way, you won't miss an episode in your queue. You don't have to pay anything. I know subscribe usually means you're paying something, but this time, it means you just are notified when there's something new. There are many more to come that we're excited about, so thank you for watching and listening. This year, we're celebrating a milestone that's so close to my heart, I have to say, the 30th anniversary of Oprah's Book Club. Books continue to be one of my greatest pleasures in life. As a young girl, I have to tell you, books were my lifeline. They allowed me to know that I wasn't alone and opened a window into other worlds. And it's been one of the great joys of my life to create a book club that is endured. There would never have been a book club had there not been you as an author. Really? And thrived for three decades. Millions of readers have come along with me reading selections that just immersed us in other people's lives and hopefully ignited something within us. That same spirit lives in every conversation we have here on the Oprah podcast. Our friends at Audible are helping honor our big 3-0 by featuring our official Oprah's Book Club selections along with the 30 books I love as audiobooks. Audible doesn't just keep you entertained with incredible audiobooks and podcasts. It genuinely enriches your life. You take something away from every story and because it's audio, you can listen to these stories wherever you are. Stuck in traffic. On a walk or a hike. Winding down before bed. When you find a story that speaks to you on Audible, it stays with you. That's the whole idea. My deepest, profound, heartfelt thanks to Audible for presenting this special episode of the Oprah Podcast. Audible. Stories that speak to you. New members can start listening to Audible's Book Club audiobooks. and more with a 30-day free trial. - And listening to the excerpt of your memoir, Spark, this question for me that I'm gonna ask you, Oceanel, you say in there that you pay attention to other people and one of the things that I admire most about all of you as writers is your attention to detail, whether that is of other human beings who eventually obviously become characters in your stories or whether that is the landscape. I mean, the first chapter of your novel, The Emperor of Gladness, the landscape is its own character. And I'm curious, what it is you're noticing about being human right now, that the rest of us are overlooking. - Oh gosh, thank you so, so much, right? I think there's a lot of self-fear, there's a lot of self-policing, you know, there's this, we live in an age of perennial judgment, we don't know when we're going to be filmed, who's filming us, and especially for young people, it's created a lot of hesitation about acting and acting as a human being. And I think what requires of us, especially when you take a chance to be a novelist or an actor, you're daring something into reality. You're rolling the dice. And I think our surveillance culture around social media has stopped a lot of us and it's not just young people, it's adults, it's older people, it's now, how will I be judged forever? And human endeavor is about the endeavor of risk. Will I risk being a fool in order to go after the thing? And I really related to that excerpt by Viola's book because it really is about, can you push through shame to realize that there's something beyond it? And I think on my best days as a writer, I don't always have these days. On my best days, I get the work done because my desire to have a voice outpaces my terror of being alive. It just beats, it's just one foot ahead. It's not every day you get that. Sometimes the terror wins, you have to lay down. But I think right now we have built a culture that has induced more terror than desire to take risks. - And you were saying you'd share that with me that you're a student, you're teaching the university and that so many times the students don't even speak up now because they're afraid of the risk. - Yeah. - They, they, you can see it in their body posture. There's a shame embedded in even being an artist in trying something because afraid of what being canceled, afraid of being a judge for the attempt at sincerity. - I think sincerity is a tricky thing in our culture because the person who is sincere has believed in something. - Yes. - And only someone who has been duped believes in something. So cynicism is a kind of fake intelligence. So you perform cynicism. You say, ah, that can't be true. I don't believe, I'm gonna stay on the line and judge everybody else. - Yeah. - But the artist has to put the step forward and run forward. But it's easy to judge people who run ahead of you and say, ah, look, they all bought the idea and now they're trying too hard. So to be a try hard is to be a kind of loser who's been duped into the endeavor. - Wow. - And as Barbara said, I think the hardest thing I've ever done is try to write a book. (laughing) It's like, when I sit down like ancestors, grandma, mama, please come. I'm gonna need everybody in the week. - So you don't see it as a gift. You don't see it as a gift either. - I tell you, the opportunity to be a writer is a gift. - Oh, yes. - I am living in the whipped cream of my life. - Oh, I love that. - Absolutely. - Yeah. - I'm gonna take that phrase and may or not, may or may not give it to you. (laughing) I've been saying, I've been living my life like it's golden. But I like, I'm living in the whipped cream of my life. - I love it. - You get your order, Sunday, it comes. You know, expect the whipped cream. But then when you get it, it's that extra. And I don't know about y'all, but I'm the kind of person that if there's some sand in my whipped cream, I'm going down. - Yeah. - So as tough as, you know, life as a writer is, it is a gift to be able to do it. But the vocation itself, I agree with Barbara, is not a gift. It's hard work. It's honoring your family, bringing dignity to your community. And you can't do that carelessly. - Yes. - But the opportunity to wake up and say, I get to dream. - Well, it's so interesting. You mentioned it's tough as a writer because I read some place. It's like 89 to 92% of the books that actually get published. - Oh, yeah. - We don't even hear about them. - We don't even know who those people are. So to be known as a writer, to be awarded as a writer, to be-- - To make a living as a writer. - To make a living as a writer. - Extraordinary. - It's rare. - It's pretty extraordinary. - Yeah. - I'm wondering, what does it mean when all of you, as writers, you hit the best sellers list? What does that mean? - You know, it's a moment of disbelief, do I really belong? I think it's, again, that sense of shame is prevalent. And you think, am I a pretender? Am I, did I just-- - How could you be pretender? You better, I mean, yeah. How could you be pretender? - But I think, you know, there's a lot of us walking around in the world with a sort of elemental wound that says, you don't quite belong, you don't have what it takes. And speaking for myself, I went into medicine because, like many people, they go into medicine to heal your wound in this by caring for others. So you have this sense that you're never quite there. And so I think the moment when you call me, the moment when this book hit the best seller list, it's a bit overwhelming. And you have to actually rise up and realize that you need to own this. You are now, you can't sort of make excuses for yourself. And you know, they all shock stuff. This is you, you did it, and you should celebrate and take that moment, which is something I didn't do often enough, I think, comes to self-effacing for reasons. I don't even understand. - Yeah. Barbara, when that happened to you, and it's happened to you, many times, when you hit the best seller list, what does it mean? And now there's the expectation that you're going to hit the best seller list. So that's even daunting. It's scary. I'm an extremely introverted person. I'm going to say that most, most fiction writers, most people who choose to spend eight to 10 hours a day alone in a room, with their keyboard are introverts. So, the success for me is that I get to do this for a living. This is the most fun job in the world. I get to get up in the morning, go to the coffee machine, go to my desk, that's my commute. I get to make up stories for a living. I get to excavate for meaning, as you say. That's what I get to do for a living. And if I do my job right, I'm going to have this conversation with millions of people and our lives together will somehow, we'll have this communion. That's success to me. In the same way that I never thought I would be a writer when I grew up, I never wanted to be famous. You know, that was never my idea of success, because I was the person who never spoke in class. I hate to have my picture taken. When we were kids and we all pretended that we could have a superpower, the one I always chose was invisibility. - Really? - I still would choose it. So, for me, the public part of writing is the hard part. And I don't want to sound ungrateful or ungracious. I don't write about the most commercial things. The heart of darkness, you know, child abuse, whatever, that readers will trust me and trust my earnestness. I love what you said about the risk of belief that I can be earnest on the page and take that risk and people will follow me there. So, I didn't hitch my wagon to those stars of bestseller or this or that. I was just so happy that I got enough royalties from the first book to write the second one and so on. It just seems too good to be true that this whipped cream life keeps going on. - Living in the whipped cream with our lives. - Me. - Actually, I'm lactose intolerant, but that's okay. - You need me too. - But there's hope in a cream. (laughing) - We'll go with it. But, you know, it's just like, I can't believe it's real and I don't want this to be about me. to shine it on something else. What the book is about. If I could write a book that helps outsiders understand - Appalachia. - Appalachia, yeah. And to stop making fun of us, to stop seeing us as a joke, understand what was done to us. That's about my people, and I can feel proud of that. I just am not a person who can, I don't know, strut around and say, look at me. It just doesn't work. Well, that's good, that's a good thing. One of the greatest compliments, I think I remember receiving his ocean, when you were telling me that you and your mother, who was a manicurist and ran a manicurist shop, would sometimes, I would be the third person in the shop on the days where there wasn't a lot of business or on Mondays, and that the women in the shop when the Oprah show was on would leave and go to the bookstore when I was announcing a book. That was just one of the greatest compliments, and I'm wondering, what's one of the greatest compliments you've had from people who've read your story and shared what your story meant to them? I'll ask you that first ocean, and then you via. The greatest compliment, I think, is when someone says, you've articulated a sentence, which is available, lords are available to all of us. They weigh nothing, and yet all of us are here because of it. It's a kind of a magical thing. When a reader says, you use the sentence to confirm my life. Wow. And I never sit down with that goal, because I'm not presumptuous enough to believe I can confirm anybody's life. But what you realize is that when you build a book, you kind of build a town square where everyone can embody. And a reader can stand in the place that you've built and say, this feels like a confirmation of the life I've led. It truly feels miraculous. And I think that it's not about, you know, craft or how well you've done something. But that simply, you've made my life feel real or to me than I thought was possible. And again, that's not something one sits down at the desk to do. Well, I call that for you, poetic literature. You have this great ability to capture life on the fringe for people and to look at people who have been marginalized in a way that makes them feel like they're not just leading ordinary lives with that there's something extraordinary in their humanness. That's, I think, one of your gifts. Well, I relate to what you said, you know, in your book club and on the show, because I think on the most fundamental level of being an office, you can talk about craft all you want. And that's great, but at the fundamental level, I don't think you can be a successful novelist if you're not interested in people. You have to truly be invested in human beings. Right. Yeah. The same thing for an actor. You know, I was about to say that. And that's what you've done on your show and now. And I think it's the same work. It's just a different medium. Yeah. So what's been the most gratifying for you? When people just say me too, that's it. That's the hook. You know, the thing about, I never want to say anything that's full of crap. But I also a little bit want to, don't want to make myself look bad. But the thing about writing a book that I feel lands and getting accolades for it, you're always driven by this incredible imposter syndrome when you're in the public. You are, you're afraid of being misunderstood, you're always misunderstood. People want to put greatness on you and you always want it. Yeah, it's like, really? Am I great or am I really crappy? All right. So you get the accolades and you're like, they didn't find me out. Yes. Then there's another appeal that's underneath that, okay? Because once again, it goes back to the constant asking of the why. Why do you feel such a need to not be an imposter? Why do you feel a need to get the accolades and it, it goes back to Icarus, right? Who wants to be as close to God as far as the name is burned? All right. We want to justify our existence. We want to believe that we were wonderfully and divinely made as just who we are. We want to feel worthy. Listen, I can't go back to the past and change the fact that, you know, I wore a soiled underwear for weeks and I would never call my hair and all of my teeth were rotten. I can't change that by getting an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony Award. So I have to have some sort of reconciliation that God loves me too. Even with the soiled underwear, you know, it's like Joseph Campbell said, he said, I never met a human being that was an extraordinary. I have to believe that I am extraordinary without all of that. So I think that's what so when someone even says me too, I'm like, oh, okay. So you're going through that too. So it's a connection. It's a connection to feel not alone. Yeah. And it's a connection to feeling like that extraordinary ness of life comes from just being you, you that simple. I know that's a hard thing for people to embrace. I always say, well, when the Oscar, well, when the Oscar, I always compared to buying a car. I said, as soon as you buy a brand new car, you drive it off the lot. It starts to depreciate in value. That's what it felt like. I'm like, oh, man, I got an Oscar. Okay. Okay. What am I supposed to do with this now? But that's what I'm supposed to do with it. Yeah, that it's just a physical manifestation of something that I should already feel inside. Yeah. I don't need the gold statue to be able to justify that. How about you, Barbara? The greatest, the greatest compliment from your readers, how you make them feel. I think we're probably all going to say about the same thing that when someone says, you saw me. Yeah. And that has over the years taken so many forms after demon copperhead. I got letters from kids who came up through the foster care system. Right. I'm sure you said, how did you know? I didn't think anybody knew what this was like or from people who had gone through addiction or who had lost a family member, people who have been through really hard things that I, in fact, haven't, I mean, I was not. I didn't grow up in the foster care system and so forth. But when people with these very specific, painful experiences tell you, you got it. You saw me, that is, that's a remarkable compliment because I don't know whether you, you know, you say we're not setting out to do that. Maybe not specifically. And there's so many specific ways that people do feel seen. But there's a quote from James Baldwin that I really love. And I'll try to get it almost right. He said it was through books that I first understood that the same things that tormented me, tormented all the other people in the world and all the other people who've ever lived me. It's that torment. It's interrogating our torment. The things that worry us the most are the things that connect us. So when somebody says, you saw me, I feel like I've done my job. I've reached through that portal understanding that everybody who reads a book is having a different experience and they're bringing their own experience and their own torment and their own dreams and wishes and regrets. But they've found something in there that validated what they needed the most. How would you answer that Abraham? Well, one of the nicest compliments I ever got was for my first nonfiction book set, you know, in the territory of Barbara Wrights about so nicely, someone said to me, you know, I lived in this town all my life and I never saw the things that you saw. I mean, I was just blind to them and you brought them out. And I always thought that the very thing that had made me feel in how to quit being an outsider, you know, never quite getting all the rituals of Friday night, pass and pyre, whatever it was, were also an advantage. I always had this sense that being an outsider was a disadvantage, but as a writer, I think I saw things that others were blind to and this was a, you know, just a good feeling that I got that right and maybe I was blessed to be able to see it. But the other great compliment that I've received, I think, is when someone writes to me saying, typically a college student saying, because of your book, your novel, I want to go into medicine. And that just, I mean, that to me is worth more than anything because my calling to medicine came from a book. It was one book, you know. And I think that's what books can do. One book, as someone says, can break the ice of the frozen sea. One word. It was that sense of one book that just launched me to medicine. And so when I can do that for somebody, I save those letters. They're very precious. It's the reason I set out to write a novel in the first place was to write a book like the one that brought me to medicine. Well, you know, you started in-- was it East Tennessee? Was it East? Yes. And you ended up writing because you weren't able to put into the medical journal what you needed to say about the AIDS patients you were treating at the time. Is that how you became a writer? Not very much. So I think all of us in medicine are deeply embedded in story. I mean, the word story is in the history that we take from the patient. It's a story. So stories are all around us. But the story of that small town in the 80s, where suddenly we had more HIV patients than anyone predicted for a ton of 50,000, the mystery of why, which turned out to be gay men coming back from the big cities after many years. But I wrote a paper describing why these numbers were so high, this phenomenon of emigration into the big city, and then this tragic return. But I always felt that the scientific paper didn't do justice to the tragic nature of the voice, to the heroism of the families. And it was really the desire to tell that story, and recognizing the inadequacy of the language of science that made me become a writer, a spark to become a writer, tried to tell that story. And so you ended up writing a book about that experience instead of just the medical paper about it. Yes, indeed. Yeah. And I think that was the moment that made me feel like, well, maybe I can write. But I still must confess, I feel like a pretender in this company, because these are the writers I look up to. Please. No, no, no. Please, I don't know how you did it. I mean, Barbara, you say you go from your coffee to the writing table every day. Ocean is obviously teaching and writing. You are doing rounds, and then coming home and sitting at your kitchen table at night, and you came up with this novel, I think that's extraordinary. I almost feel like I can't claim it, because it does feel extraordinary, and when I look back at some point-- And that is your name on the book, okay? That's a big book. And that's a big book. I was going to say that. That's a big book, absolutely. But I don't want to be too much of a shock, but really, it does feel extraordinary, and that's the thing about writing. I think we'll all agree. It's hard work, but there are also moments when we're tapping into something that wasn't ours. It feels like magic. It's just completely magical. Yeah, I feel like a novel is 95% just sweat and 5% magic. And you never-- and that thing that comes, and you say, where did that come from? And I know Alice Walker, notwithstanding, I know it came from inside me, you know, a dream or something, but when Alice thinks, I remember that, obviously, the color purple, I have the first edition. I remember reading about it as a book review-- reading it as a book review in New York Times in '82, getting up, putting on my shoes, galaches, because it was rainy Sunday, and going out to get the book, and then reading the book, and then going back and get every copy, and that was in the store. So I've passed out a lot of copies of the color purple long before I had a book club, but I think what she and so many other authors I've spoken to are talking about is that it feels like a visitation at some point when the characters remain. Do you-- you don't have that feeling? Yes, but I feel like I put them there. Okay, you put them there. I mean, because of the-- because it didn't just show up on her own. They didn't just show up. You know, because, you know, we invent them. We all do-- we all approach it in different ways, but we invent characters who will serve our story, and they need to be very specific. They have to have just the right kind of damage. Sometimes I feel like we're psychologists in reverse. We start with character and then back up and give them all the damage that they need, you know, in order to behave the way they do. But we also-- and I wonder if this is similar-- I imagine that it's similar to acting. Once we have this character, we really have to get into that character by imagining what parts of our own experience would inform this kind of-- this obsession or this animosity or this fear. I feel like I have to be as fully invested in my villains, as in my heroes. I don't even believe there are real villains, because everybody believes they're doing the right thing, you know? They all think, well, even if it's a violent, awful thing, they think, well, these people don't know it, but this is what I need to do, even if it's self-serving. And they say, I have to do this in order to create that character believably so that they don't just look cardboard on the page. They can't just be a bad guy. I have to really spend time inside the mind of someone who would do that bad thing. And I love redemption stories, usually I can come up with, you know, something in the background that twisted them, that made them this way. So by the time I've done all of that work, imagining all of this stuff that's in a life that's not even going to go on the page, then it is a visitation, but I feel responsible for it. How do you know when a sentence is done, Ocean? I don't think it is, don't I? Exactly. Well, a book is an artifact of consciousness. And in a way, I always felt a book is like a photograph. It's a photograph of the author's mind on a certain day, usually the day when the editor pulls out of your hand. Exactly. And so there's now or never, kid, you know, we're going to the factory. We're going to print and you can't keep putting red marks on this. So I think there's a kind of friction between handing something off and also accepting that like a photograph, a photograph captures you in time. But the day after that photograph is taken, you've changed. You've grown. And so a book feels that way. And so when I read from the, like, even on the last tour, there's notes all over. And I said, the oral tradition is my chance to redraw this sentence. So I'm always taking that chance up and I've made peace with that. I just felt like maybe the best way to write the best sentences as you grow is to write the next book. One of the things you said that I was so moved by in our conversation when we first talked about the impreglant as you said, kindness without the hope of return, kindness without the hope of return is a theme that runs through your writing. Please explain that. I think growing up in tough poverty, witnessing violence, experiencing being raised by women who escaped war and having them beat storytellers, they were my first teachers. And they had to gesticulate, they had to change their tone. They were both actors and storytellers all at once. And so I think for me, seeing that function, that attention is a kind of kindness, knowing that we don't know where it will go, we don't know if it can really rescue us. And I think it's easy and maybe even predictable to experience harm and tragedy and then be cruel. Of course. Right? The world broke me so I'm going to break everything around me. The tough part, the really, I think, special part is to see witness great pain and humiliation and then choose kindness, dignity, and joy amongst each other. That's difficult work. And I think I want to celebrate that in my own fiction. I ask my characters, "Who will you become after this?" Wow. And it becomes a reflection of oneself as an author. Who will I become after this tragedy, this difficulty? So the toughest thing is to be kind without expecting anything back. But the kindness itself becomes the achievement. That's the hardest act. It's so easy to be cruel. It's easy to be bitter and hate the world, but the work. That internal work of saying, "I'm going to absorb this," but then turn it into a type of healing for myself, my family, my community. That's a lifelong work. And I think it's still the great mystery of my life as an author. I'm not, you know, any higher than anybody else. I'm not great at it on some days. I don't know how to be kind. But I think that mysterious ambition to absorb hurt and then give out, healing and love is an extraordinary human mystery because it's not logical. Often you want to be able to consolidate and protect yourself. But to then become courageously soft after tremendous harm is it feels counterintuitive. And yet when you meet that person you know you've met something extraordinary, right? We recognize it, the challenges is actually making that work and I think it's a lifelong work. I think it's also, I'm really grateful that books take so long to write. And they were quick, we might we might miss it opportunity. Okay, I've noticed in a lot of my book club conversations that authors can write the book and then have trouble with the title. Does the title, does this title come easy? No, not at all. Not at all. It was a very late title but when we stumbled onto it, I remember being very excited because that word covenant which you know is sort of an unusual Old Testament kind of word. As I kept thinking about it, it occurs three or four times in the Hippocratic oath. It's very much in the Bible, you know, and it had this echo that felt just right for the period, for the characters, for the backdrop of the story, the setting in that Christian community. So once I got it, it was, I knew that that was it. You knew it. Yeah. Did you know finding me, was it called finding me before you found you? No, no. I don't know what it was called but I actually wanted the word home in there. I did. I wanted the word home but it didn't sound about coming home to yourself but then I was like finding home. And then I was push, push, push finding me because home was me. I was trying to find a safe place of belonging within myself so then I just sort of settled on it and it worked for me. It did. But it's perfect and the cover is perfect. It is. Yeah. And the cover was perfect for it, looking inside yourself. Do you mean copperhead? I come to titles early, generally, because the title is so important to me. A title of a novel is like this key that opens. It needs to be a key. So you knew it was going to be called demon copperhead? Yeah. The day, the minute I understood that I was going to do an Appalachian translation of David Copperfield, well, okay, I was going to call it copperhead. A novel was published called copperhead and I didn't want to do this to that person, you know, that writer. I didn't want to step on his title so I thought, okay, demon copperhead. Demon copperhead and that was that was that. I think that, you know what, that's a tough title actually. I thought that was, you know, when I first heard it, I literally, I read so many books, I'm like, demon copperhead, what is that? Yeah. Well, that's fine. All my titles are so… Yeah, of course you wouldn't think so much about that. Everybody, you know, so many, even my own relatives will say, I love that devil copper, actually on the plane today. Somebody walk by me saying, I loved your devil copperhead. My titles are, I love a title that has some cognitive dissonance in it, you know, a little friction, like Poisonwood Bible, opposite things, and, you know, a friction or movement. And I love a title that really goes all the way through the book, that it opens doors inside the book. So, yeah, I need to have a title early, if I don't, if I get to the end of a book and I don't have a title, I'm in deep, deep trouble. Yeah. This came from where? Early on the first draft, I don't have titles when I draft, because I just don't want to be haunted by that. So, I just go into the story, but I figured I said, I got it. I got it. All of you work so differently. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, I said, I'm just going to the story and the title will come, but when Emperor Gladden came, what I hope for my titles is that the meaning of the title is one thing, when you see it, and that meaning should change by the end of the book. Exactly. So, the same phrase should have a completely different meaning, and that's the poet and me. It's like the alchemy of language. It's the same words. It's very triumphant. When you see it in the bookstore, but when you read the process of the book, it should change language itself. And I think after, at the end of this book, you'll be like, oh, wow, Emperor Gladden says not what I thought it would be. So, the book becomes a process of distortion of language, which is what language is. It distorts. It keeps changing, even though we think it's fixed. And so, when a title could have a different resonance, a different impact at the end of the book, then that's really excites me, isn't it? I'm going to ask this of all of you. I know this is true for you, Viola. So, let's begin with you. Did you discover a truth about yourself through your characters? Well, my characters are of your soul in my life, but was it personal therapy to write it? It's really the question. It's absolutely personal therapy. For you. Yeah. You know what? I keep going back to the saying that on your last down earth, your last image being the person you became meets the person you could have become. I think that's what guides me. The person you became meets the person you could have become. That last image, and the reason why I'm saying that is because, listen, I'm a mediator according to Myers-Briggs, I'm in a very existential phase in my life. I just feel like you have to burn when you're going through any sort of anxiety, depression, which I definitely was going through with the book. I just finished a television show, you know, I'm in my late 50s. I've gotten a whole bunch of accolades, all of that, and felt empty. The disillusionment of not really hitting that final ceiling, which was, I remember you said this to me once, transcendence. I feel like you have to burn. I feel that it's something in you that has to like sort of reset to be like a phoenix and reborn, redone everything, and so I go back to the story of my father when he's beating my mom. I had so much social anxiety at that time. That's how I see myself, even now, social anxiety, shy, introvert, you know, not as pretty as, not as whatever as. So this story keeps coming at me, right? I'm looking for something to sort of once again justify my existence, justify that by all of you got it, you got some girl, okay? Tom, the story's coming, coming, coming, and in the story, I stopped my dad from splitting my mom's head. Yeah, I remember that. And I screamed at him at 14, with my baby sister in my arms, who was a year old. And I screamed with the authority of a gullithe. I just said stop, and you give me that glass, you stop, and I made him do it. I made him give me that glass, and I bashed it on the table and said, don't you ever do that? Okay, silence in me when I was writing it. And then I wrote what I discovered is I had it in me. I had it in me, it's the biggest discovery about myself, it's, you know, you talk about cognitive dissonance. I think that so much of what I was looking for is sort of, it's like people say, don't go back to the past, it hasn't changed, there's nothing back there for you anymore, okay? But I never thought that shame, even if it never goes away, the pain of it, even if it never goes away, the social anxiety, even if it never goes away, okay, that there cannot be anything beautiful that can grow in that garden. And what I realize is you can count it all as beauty, all of it, every last bit of it, every last bit of it is a connected tissue that makes up you. It's the hardest thing about acting, actually, because it's close proximity to Hollywood. Hollywood is about selling tickets, putting butts in the seat, being beautiful all the time. You know, you got to love seeing, so you got to get thin, go to the gym, scan, face, beat, or whatever. And then you have your art, which has nothing to do with that. It's got to do with the stretch marks. It's got to do with the lines under your face. The more honest you are, the most beautiful you are. That's what I had to discover in that book, the beauty of the imperfection. And that's what stepped out at me, and in a special-- Well, I stepped out with Suck-a-Mother because everybody when they write kids, kids are always beautiful in movies, you know, kids never say Suck-a-Mother, get it, you know, get an aff on a test, you know? But, yeah, yeah. If that makes any sense. It makes all the sense. How would you answer that question? Did you discover a truth about yourself through the characters? I think the thing I discovered was something that I couldn't articulate, but as I kept writing more and more especially this book, The Covenant and the character of Big Amici, is my conviction that the ordinary was sacred. And, you know, it was something that I sort of kept coming back to, that the ordinary, that the goodness in an ordinary person like that, if you managed to capture it well, it was sacred. And so I felt like I- But you do that throughout the book, and in all of your writing, there's no difference between the left and the position. I didn't quite get it until I was writing and shaping these characters. The sense that, you know, in their ordinaryness was something precious and sacred, you know, was something really consequential. And, you know, then the second insight was, I was finding redemption, that there was no character in there that I saw as villainous. Yeah, just like Barbara, because I felt like everybody has regrets. Wasn't there a critique of yours? Somebody critiqued you in saying, "All your characters were too good." I know, yeah. Which I thought was great, because then I had accomplished in a sense. Yeah. What I didn't know, I was trying to understand is that we are sacred, and we're all looking for redemption in one way or another. So there was a profound insight that I carry with me, the sense of the sacred in the ordinary, the sense of, you know, anybody has a side that, even if they don't know it, is on its path to redemption or seeking it, they may not know it yet. And your answer to that, sir. Well, I learned a lot about relationships being anomalous, because I think you're called the author, you have authority. You can make people do things and move them about, but if you are a careful author, you give every character a matrix of inevitable traits. They wouldn't do this, they wouldn't do that, where they come from. And when you do it well enough, you get to a point where you say to yourself, "I need this character to go cuss out her mother." And in right away, you realize she wouldn't do that, though. I've led her up to this point, and I'm now, I'm forced, if I force her to do this, I will betray both her and the art I've made. And I started to realize, because I started as a poet, and when fiction writers used to say that I thought, "Oh, come on, guys." You know, when they say things like, "All the characters tell me what to do," right? And I said, "Oh, come on, but you wrote it, but only until I became an anomalous, that I realized, no, after a while, you're giving them enough traits, enough background." And they start to do things that maybe you yourself wouldn't do, but that is who they are. A woman would not go cuss out her mother because she's built into this matrix. And if I did, I would betray her, and I started to look at the people around my life. And I realized that love was about meeting people where they are. I can't change, I can't change and force that change just because I think it's the better thing. I have to meet my brother, my family, where they are in this matrix of who they become. And love then is a kind of grace, rather than, you know, forcing a better reality into it. Well, I can't thank you all enough. This is like heaven for me being able to sit with you. Thank you. Barbara King Solver, Abraham Brighese, Viola Davis, Ocean Bong. Thank you for being a part of this. And for our friends at Audible for presenting today's very special anniversary episode of Oprah's Book Club. A reminder, our partners at Amazon have created a storefront to make it so easy for you to find all 2124 selections. Just a quick scan of the QR code right there on your screen. Thanks to all of you readers who have been with me, many of you, for 13 years. I hope you all have enjoyed this conversation as much as I have. To buy a copy of my Book Club selections by Abraham Brighese, Barbara King Solver, Ocean Bong, Viola Davis, and all the Oprah's Book Club selections head on over to our very own Amazon storefront by scanning the QR code on your screen. Our listeners tell us that the podcast is resonating with you and is serving as a bright spot in your day. So here's the thing. I would really appreciate it if you like and subscribe to the Oprah podcast on YouTube or wherever you podcast. It's just a quick tap of the subscribe button, and that way you won't miss an episode in your queue. I know subscribe usually means you're paying something, but this time it means you just are notified when there's something new. There are many more to come that we're excited about, so thank you for watching and listening.