[00:00:00] Jane: Welcome to Historical Happy Hour, the podcast that explores new and exciting historical fiction novels. I’m your host, Jane Healey, and in today’s episode, we welcome my friend, best selling author Linda Loigman, Linda Cohen Loigman, to discuss her brand new novel, The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern, described by Publishers Weekly as a poignant tale of love, of late in life love with lovingly researched details, and a touch of magical whimsy.
And as of today, People magazines pick of the week. Welcome to Linda. Thank you so much for doing this.
[00:00:35] Lynda: I am so excited to see, first of all, Jane, I’m so excited to see your face. I’m so excited to be chatting with you. This is like my favorite thing to like, in my in my jeans and in my comfy clothes.
And talk to you about historical fiction and thank you so much for having me.
[00:00:52] Jane: Oh, yeah. No, this is so great. I was just saying to Linda before we got on, it’s like this second week in a row. I have a friend on the podcast and it’s just, I’m so looking forward to it. I loved the book. I loved it. Loved it. And I’m so happy to have you here.
I’m going to do a quick bio and then we’ll jump in. Linda Cohen Leugman is the author of The Matchmaker’s Gift. the Wartime Sisters, and the Two Family House. She received a B. A. from Harvard College and a J. D. from Columbia Law School. She grew up in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, and now lives with her family in New York.
Thank you again for coming. Of
[00:01:25] Lynda: course.
[00:01:26] Jane: I love this book and tell us the inspiration for this wonderful story, which is rooted in your family’s history, specifically your husband’s great grandmother.
[00:01:35] Lynda: Yeah. So my husband’s great grandmother was a pharmacist and she graduated from Fordham’s School of Pharmacy in 1921.
And I had always heard stories about her. She, my mother in law had this like needlepoint pillow in their house when I first started dating my husband and it was. It’s a needlepoint picture of a woman with red hair in a pharmacy lab coat and it had needlepointed like little like pharmacy scales and different things all around the pillow and it said Goldie on it and that was her name.
I did not know that was her nickname. I thought that was her actual like given name. Real name, but anyway, she was always referred to as goldie and they always told stories about her because she lied about her age All the time she had a store that had been her husband’s store and he passed away Very young and so she went to pharmacy school so she could run the store She had that story for many decades and then the neighborhood turned and then she sold it and she Started working at hospitals as a hospital pharmacist and she lied about her age several times She used to my father in law would white out her certificate And type in a different date.
And like my husband and I now are like, you could have gotten in a lot of trouble for that. But they just they’re like, it was fun. Nobody cared, like the seventies, whatever. The seventies were a lawless time in our country. And yeah, in the eighties, I guess we’re equally lawless.
So that was like always the story of her. And I always wanted to write About a woman like her, not really her, she was inspiring, but I always I was more wedded to the set. It was something about the setting, the pharmacy setting that really. But I didn’t have a story like I was like, there’s a, like you try to put yourself together, there’s a female pharmacist and then like I had no conflict.
I had no story. And then it wasn’t until a long time later. I set my sights on it once I, after the match, after I wrote the matchmaker’s gift. And I wanted to do another story with, that was historical, but with a little magical realism. I was like, that pharmacy setting would be really great.
And it would be, it lends itself so nicely to a magical realism kind of thing. Because there’s powders and chemicals and stuff, in a farm, the whole prescription room is at your disposal. So that was exciting. But I needed to figure out the voices of the characters. And that was where time that I spent with my dad helped me.
[00:03:55] Jane: Oh, nice. Nice. Lovely. I loved, I always love author’s notes. Everyone on this podcast is probably sick of me talking about author’s notes, but I love them. And I’m like obsessed. And so talk about your research and your research process for the story and if there’s anything surprises you ran into along the way.
[00:04:12] Lynda: Yeah. This research was really fun because it took me in so many different directions. Yeah. So first I read memoirs of pharmacists. That was where I started to figure out like what would it be like, like what issues would I even talk about? What would be the anecdotes? And so I read a good number of those and those were really helpful just for figuring out like the role of the pharmacist in that time period because they were really such a pillar of the neighborhood and people would go to them before going to their doctors.
I mean you would go to the pharmacist. The doctor was many steps after that. And in some of those memoirs, what I found was the pharmacists really prided themselves on knowing their customers and it was a really, it was a different kind of time. So there were several memoirs or several excerpts of memoirs.
That I read that really that referred to the pharmacist who was telling the story kind of saving somebody’s life because they knew like arsenic, for example, was something that was prescribed then because it would whiten someone’s complexion and they would use arsenic. To get like their skin white, but of course it’s deadly, right?
And you could poison someone with it And so there were several instances where people would ask for arsenic But the pharmacist would not give it to them because they Had a feeling that something not good was going on either self harm Or like murder intent like they would know these things.
So that was really interesting so my research started with the memoirs and then it was like A lot of old magazines, American, American pharmacist and just pharmacy magazines to see what the pharmacies back then would be selling, what the products were. And then I did a lot of magical realism and herbology, not magical realism, magic, like research on magic, like on love magic.
And jewish love magic, so specifically, and herbology, and just like holistic healing, and just the plants that might be used, and folklore like folklore remedies, and just like all kinds, went down that whole path, which was interesting also. And then there was the path of Brooklyn in the 1920s and prohibition and what that meant and gangsters and because pharmacies were a really interesting place at that time because they were one of the few places where you were allowed to sell alcohol legally.
You could get a prescription for a pint of whiskey, one pint every 10 days and that was the law and there were these special prescription pads that were like very carefully monitored and you needed a special license. But the gangsters at that time knew about that. So for a while, they, a lot of them would set up like a fake pharmacy.
Would there be no brick and mortar store? It would just be like a pharmacy on paper. And then they would get deliveries of the alcohol. But then when the government cracked down on those licenses, Then, they would strong arm pharmacists sometimes and give them a lot of fake prescriptions, and, or some, or just rob them just be there waiting when they knew the delivery was coming and just take it, just take the whiskey.
So there was all sorts of stuff like that going on. And of course, when you do research, especially in so many different directions, there are so many surprises and so many fun things. One of the most fun things that I found out about, that I would like to write a book about one day, but I don’t know if I ever will, is So it’s pharmacy related, like soda counters were obviously very big.
They were in pharmacies and they, people would have ice cream sodas, but they would also have a drink called an egg cream, which is chocolate syrup and milk and seltzer. And it’s cheap. It’s cheaper than ice cream soda. Cause you don’t need the ice cream. So it’s an inexpensive treat. And chocolate syrup was a big thing and it was made all over New York.
And there was a whole racket. Yeah. Like a gangster controlled racket for chocolate syrup. There was the chocolate syrup racket and people were murdered. People were killed and I found this whole podcast on it or it wasn’t a podcast. It was like a serial, like play, like in different parts. It’s crazy.
So like for a while I wanted to add that in the book, but it was too much. Like it, it just, I couldn’t fit it in, which is what happens sometimes, like you find out all these interesting things and you can’t, there’s no way to put everything you find out. But I would love to, I’d love to do like a story on the chocolate syrup racket.
Look, if you Google it, like for the listeners, if you Google the chocolate syrup gangster racket, it’s very interesting.
[00:08:25] Jane: Yeah, I think you need to tuck that in your back pocket. Before I ask you the next question, a couple people said they can’t hear. I can hear you fine, but could you get your, put your volume up a little bit?
[00:08:34] Lynda: Okay, I’ll put it up there. Is that better?
[00:08:37] Jane: Let me see.
[00:08:40] Lynda: Better everybody? No?
[00:08:41] Jane: It’s good for me. I’m still like, like I said, I hear you fine. So I’m not sure.
[00:08:47] Lynda: I’ll talk louder.
[00:08:49] Jane: And I’ll try it out on this and make sure it’s good. Okay. Yeah. Okay, we’re good. We’re gonna keep going. So alright. This is a dual timeline story with very different stories.
So one is in a retirement community in the eighties in Florida, one timeline, and one is in 1920s Brooklyn. And you created these rich worlds with all these fun characters and how did you balance These two very different worlds and, what was the challenging, most challenging part of balancing these very different stories that have to intertwine as you go along?
[00:09:25] Lynda: Yeah, that’s a good question. When I wrote The Matchmaker’s Gift that was a dual timeline story and it was two separate characters. So it was Sarah and then her granddaughter Abby. And it was like writing two novels and it was really hard. And I swore I would never do it again. So of course I had to do it again.
But this time it was a little bit easier because It’s Augusta in both timelines. It’s Augusta, it’s young Augusta making all of her mistakes. And then it’s almost 80 year old Augusta who is facing the consequences of all the mistakes that she made in her past. And I think the challenge was like, the tone is very different in the two timelines.
So the tone of 1980s, which is where it starts. The first scene is in the 1980s. Is I hope humorous, it’s supposed to be funny like they’re she when the story. Oh, this isn’t a spoiler because this is like the very first chapter when the story opens. Augusta has just been fired from her job and she’s forced to retire and she moves to Florida and on her very first day after swimming her laps because she’s a super fit almost 80 year old woman she gets out of the pool and someone calls her nickname over her shoulder and it’s a name that she’s always hated and she hasn’t heard it for 60 years and she freezes in the Florida sunshine she goes.
Totally cold and she turns around and there is Irving Rifkin, the man who broke her heart 60 years earlier, who was her father’s pharmacy delivery boy. And so it starts there and it’s, I think it’s fun. I tried to make it funny because she’s so angry to see him and he’s so happy to see her. So it’s just funny because he’s I thought you said you’d never leave New York.
And she says, and I thought you’d be dead, like they have a real rapport. The managing the two tones and keeping true to those, because the 1920s tone is very rich, the set, it’s very atmospheric. It’s that’s where the mystical kind of part is. And, um, Augusta’s great aunt comes to stay with them and she’s from the old world and she has, she’s doing, mystical healing things.
And so the 1920s part is more serious. And it was like managing those two things and not like trying to sometimes I would be in a funny mood. I’d be like, I’m so funny. Let’s tell some more jokes. I would have to stop myself from, it took, it was like a very different headspace to write those things.
[00:12:00] Jane: Oh, yeah, I’m sure yeah, so
[00:12:02] Lynda: That was the challenge like I write in the order that you read so I always make myself stop I don’t write one and you know all of one time and then all the other I read it in the order that you read it and so There’s a little bit of whiplash, you know in terms of just really the voice and the tone of the two time periods.
So that was the challenge. Just man. Oh yeah. Yeah.
[00:12:24] Jane: And I was thinking about it when you were writing and it was funny. The retirement community was really funny. And I have to give a shout out cause I was reading it and listening to it on audio book at the same time. And the audio book narrator like nailed it.
Like her voices, everything was it was so good.
[00:12:40] Lynda: Yeah. I really love her. She was one of the voices for the matchmakers gift. I had two voices.
[00:12:44] Jane: Okay.
[00:12:45] Lynda: Sarah and then Abby, because Abby’s young, so I had asked them could we have two voices for that one? Because it felt like it was two different people and it was like two books.
So they did that but the, but it’s Gabra Zachman and she’s the voice. Oh, so good. For this whole book. Yeah. And I really love, I really loved her. Yeah.
[00:13:01] Jane: Yeah. Speaking of great on Esther. I want to talk about her as a character. She comes to live with August young Augusta in the 1920s with her family after, and this isn’t a spoiler, Augusta’s mom passes away.
And so I loved her as a character. I’ve noticed in like your reviews, like people love this character. And I think today she’d be described as like a. Holistic healer or homeopathic healer and but of course there’s also this mysterious mystical element to her. How did you develop Esther as a character?
[00:13:36] Lynda: So Esther’s, she comes, she goes from house to house in her family. She is from Russia slash Poland, whatever, back then they never really were sure because the borders were always changing. So she comes to this country, she’s an immigrant. But her English is very good because she’s been here a while and she’s stayed with different relatives wherever she’s needed.
So she goes wherever she’s needed and Augusta’s family needs her because her mother has passed away and it’s the house has gone to rack and ruin. Like they’re eating junky meals and there’s dust everywhere. And so her father, who is a pharmacist, Solomon Stern, agrees to let Esther come.
But my thought was that always that Esther was going to be. A little bit of a thorn in Solomon Stern’s side, because he is very serious about the way he goes about being a pharmacist, he takes his job very seriously, he’s very scientific, very by the book, measuring every gram of, everything, and he truly believes in the science of everything, and he does not look past that.
If the science doesn’t work, if the actual whatever, then there’s nothing that can be done. And of course he’s grieving because he’s lost his wife. And Esther doesn’t go about it like that. She knows just as much as him, she has studied, but she was never allowed to go to school. She was a woman, a long time ago, in a in a country where women were not allowed to go to school.
And so she talks about that. She talks about how in her village there was another man. There was a man who was like her, but he was the apothecary and people called her the witch or like the Baba Yaga, which is like the Russian fairy tale of a witch. And I think I just always wanted to explore that this idea that there’s, the matchmakers gift had this to this, the exploring a woman who is fighting for her position in a man’s world and a man, a career in a place where men are usually dominant in that career.
And for Esther. I was just really thinking about this idea that men, for someone like that, if a woman is really talented, they always think there’s a trick to it, right? So if a woman gets a promotion at work, the men will say it’s because she slept with the boss, or whatever it is.
And in Esther’s case, it’s she’s a witch. And she says she has a line, every talented woman, to some men, every talented woman is a witch. And that idea helped me. I had that theme in mind. So she came forward, her voice blossomed and was evolved because of that theme.
I wanted her to be a woman who society had discounted and somebody who isn’t really seen. And she sees the people she’s healing. She goes about everything in a very different way. And she is funny because when people come to the pharmacy and the pills don’t work, she like gives them a wink and a nod and says I got something for you.
Come with me. , and she gives them chicken soup laced with whatever it is. It was also, there’s, so there’s a phrase, which I’m sure many people will know, called Jewish penicillin, which is what people would call chicken soup, right? . And I’m not that, chicken soup is like a healing thing in every culture.
Everybody makes chicken soup for their sick kids or sick relatives. But this idea that, that phrase, Jewish penicillin, I just, I love that phrase. I wanted to use it in the book, but penicillin wasn’t invented. Oh, a thing in 1920. And actually that was another historical path that I went down, because when I was researching the history of penicillin, Penicillin became mass produced.
I don’t remember the year that it was invented, but it became mass produced because of world war two. And because they needed it to fight infection on the battlefield. So they started mass producing it and it’s like a mold and there were in New York, that was one of the like production centers.
And there were, I feel like this is a book you should write Jane. There were this group of young women called the the penicillin girls. Is it the penicillin girls? Yeah, the penicillin girls, they would feed the mold. Like they were in charge of watching the mold and stirring it and feeding you’d have to give it sugary.
They fed the big vats of penicillin and that was their job and they were the penicillin girls. And I was like, Oh, this would be a good book. It’s
[00:17:45] Jane: a great
[00:17:46] Lynda: title, but honestly, it’s boring. What do they do? They just pour. But
[00:17:51] Jane: it’s also again, like you’re saying what’s the story?
Like a woman pharmacist. Yeah. What’s the story? Like, where’s the arc? What happens?
[00:17:58] Lynda: Exactly. So there’s so many fun tidbits.
[00:18:00] Jane: Yeah.
[00:18:01] Lynda: Esther came from those, like she came from that phrase, that’s where the chicken soup idea came. And it was like this idea that she was going to be making chicken soup and singing over it.
And like this. woman in the kitchen, but She’s a great cook, but she’s also cooking up other stuff.
Yeah.
[00:18:18] Jane: I think one of the themes that came through too is the idea that, women treating women, like women treating women medically, women caring for women. I think that’s something that certainly still resonates today.
And I liked that aspect of the story too. Like even if they have to knock on someone’s door, like on Esther and in the middle of the night or whatever it is. Yeah.
[00:18:39] Lynda: Yeah. Because So this is a theme that I’ve been talking about at my launch events this week. Just the idea the idea of being seen.
And Esther sees the patients in a way that Solomon Stern doesn’t. And she sees women. And I think that’s something that we struggle with today. I know, for me, I’ve been to doctors who’ve dismissed my complaints. And I felt really like it was because I was a woman. I had terrible vertigo many years ago for months and months.
And I, and it was a real thing and I needed medicine and it was a vestibular vertigo. It was a whole long ordeal. But before I found the specialist who helped me I saw this ENT and he just would say, you’re stressed. You’re dehydrated and it just like he just absolutely didn’t listen to me. He did not care.
And so there’s this idea of being seen in the medical world and in, in just the world. I don’t know. I just think that was something that I wanted to touch on.
[00:19:36] Jane: Yeah, no, excellent. So interesting. And so I thought it was really interesting too, that you don’t read many dual narratives, many books where the main character is from, is a 79 year old woman.
So did you always plan on making her 79? As in the dual narrative? Or was that kind of something that evolved?
[00:20:00] Lynda: I really like writing about young people, and I really like writing about old people. Middle aged people, I don’t, because I’m middle aged, so I just think it’s boring. But yeah, I always knew she was going to be older. I knew that. And so that, so when I was trying to piece this book together, my dad, this, so it was in 2021.
That summer, right when everybody was like getting vaccinated, in that was that summer of 2021 and my dad had a bad fall and he got ill and he wasn’t doing well. And that whole summer was spent like me going back and forth to Florida, checking on him and like setting up aids and having, help and we weren’t sure if he was going to bounce back.
So that he could still take care of himself again, or if he wasn’t and he didn’t. So I had to move him to an assisted living community. And that was where I really, I spent a lot of time. I actually wrote a hundred pages of a different book before this book, where it was basically just like about a woman who moves her father to an assistant.
I wonder where that came from. And that was how I processed all of it. But. But it was really I sat with my dad there and I, I’ve said this, I think, in my author’s note, but my mom died very young, she was 63, and my dad dated for 15 years. And he never, up until the day he died, he was looking for companionship and wanting to be with someone and find another person to love.
He had three different long term girlfriends, but the last relationship ended right before he, right before his move because when he got out of the hospital she, and I understand this, she didn’t want to be taking care of him. She had taken care of a sick husband for a long time and she just wasn’t up for that.
And I think that happens a lot. So she was out of the picture and when he moved, and I just, I sat with him a lot in the little lobby area, the sort of lounge area in where, in his community and just listened to all of these people flirting and talking and just the whole thing. And it was so funny and so interesting and you really see then like the idea of being seen, like we don’t see.
Elderly people, a lot of the time we discount them. We don’t give them the, we don’t give them their due. We assume that they’re not as capable of having the feelings that young people have, but they are, like maybe they don’t remember every little thing, but I think to see someone that who’s that age is important and to give them.
That piece of their dignity is important. And so that’s, when I sat there, that’s when I really figured out the story. That was where the voices really came to me. And the story came and I knew that I wanted to explore an elderly Augusta and an elderly Irving, but I didn’t want them to be ill.
Like my dad was ill and the people there they were, a lot of them weren’t necessarily ill. But they all had walkers. They made them have walkers. Cause they, that was like one of the rules. You had to use a walker if you were there. And I wanted this, I wanted Augusta’s community to be active.
I wanted them to be an active community where they were still very much doing things. But that was always going to be the case.
[00:23:18] Jane: Yeah, no, and that was, you really captured that retirement community and the humor and the fact that we’re all still in high school, no matter what our age is, with the friendships and the flirtations.
[00:23:33] Lynda: And all the misunderstandings. All of it. Yeah,
[00:23:38] Jane: I have some writing questions, and then I’m going to ask people if they, if you have questions for Linda, you can put them in the chat or the Q& A. One of the ones I always ask is striking a balance between fact and fiction in your storytelling. How do you do that in terms of historical fact versus fiction?
Are there any strict rules you have?
[00:23:59] Lynda: So are there strict rules? No, I don’t think I have rules. I try to get the atmosphere right. I actually was really sad because I made a mistake right in the beginning of the book and I have to tell them about it for the paperback. Someone emailed me.
No, she didn’t email me. I saw it in a review. It was like a bad review, early on and I have Augusta when she’s let go it’s because Her, the hospital where she works is, everything is, it’s the 80s, everything is starting to become computerized and all of the numbers in her paperwork don’t add up.
And she gets called to human resources, but it would have been called personnel then. And that, and nobody, like the copy editor didn’t catch that, I didn’t catch that, but that person was right, so those things really upset me when I make a mistake like that. You know that.
[00:24:44] Jane: I know. I know. It happens though. Don’t beat yourself up.
[00:24:47] Lynda: It’s like a knife in the heart. I
[00:24:49] Jane: know. I know.
[00:24:50] Lynda: Big knife in the heart. But I think like I, I, Augusta’s mother dies of diabetes like a year before insulin is distributed to people unused. So there was like that. I wanted to, I made that year right.
I wanted the date, like I had the newspaper article when the first boy was treated in Canada. Like I try to be I try to be accurate when it comes to things like that, I try to be accurate with all, the gangster stuff, like the way that they would have approached the pharmacy, all the products that are being used but especially when you’re dealing with magical stuff you have to, there’s some suspension of disbelief, but did a lot of research on the herbs that that Esther would have used for the cures that she makes and those are all what they’re supposed to be, I think.
I tried to get them all right, but there’s this special herb that I found out about when I was researching herbs and. Plants for healing. That’s not a real plant, but it is like you can read about it. It’s called Raskolnik, Raskovnik. I always get it wrong. And it’s a plant in Russian folklore that looks like a four leaf clover, but it’s supposed to open your mind.
It’s to, and of course, that’s like what is used in the elixir that That Esther makes and that Augusta subsequently makes. And so that’s not a real plant, but it is a real, there is a real reference to that in Russian folklore. Always say that in historical fiction, it’s the fiction that saves me.
It’s the fiction that makes me want to do it because I feel like you are such a good researcher and certainly like when you’re researching, like I had one World War II home front book, but I’ve never written another World War II book and I never will write another World War II book because I feel like when you’re dealing with something like that.
You have a real responsibility and you can’t get things wrong. Like it’s so scary and it’s, like my little personnel snafu, like that’s a stab in the heart. If you get something wrong with that, with a World War II book, it’s just like 10, 000 daggers. Like it’s terrible. So if you pick. I don’t know.
I I’m not so sure that I want to write books about specific things happening. I’d prefer to have, to set it in the past and try to get all of those atmospheric details right. But I don’t want to set it like against a certain battle that happened or a certain thing that Sam Woodruff has this great book out the same day as mine called The Trade Off and it’s all about the stock market crash.
And like that research gives me hives. It makes me so nervous. Cause I think that’s like really intense. Like you have to get all that mine was much, it was a different kind. It was not as intense. Researching what is Brooklyn in the twenties, what did it look like? It’s a it’s a different kind of research.
[00:27:39] Jane: Yeah, and, but you do really, you capture, it’s so atmospheric, I, one of the quotes that someone, is on the back of your book, I think, is that someone, I want to live in this story, like you really capture that old Brooklyn vibe in such a beautiful way. I loved it. And the retirement community, which is hilarious.
So you captured them both really well.
[00:27:58] Lynda: That one was really fun.
[00:28:00] Jane: So we’ve talked in the past about this ourselves offline, but tell everyone what your writing process is like and whether you’re a plotter or a pantser.
[00:28:10] Lynda: So I’m definitely not a plotter and I’m not really a pantser either. I’m I like when I start a story, I like to know The beginning and the end.
I always know the end and I like to know the certain Stopping off points along the way. Certain dramatic scenes that I know that I’m going to want to write about. But I don’t really know how I’m going to get from one to the other. And so it’s a combination. And I don’t I make lists and I make a lot of notes but it’s not an outline.
It’s not like I say chapter one is going to have this. Because I don’t really know how long is chapter one going to take me. If I think that X, Y, Z is going to happen, then Maybe that’s only going to be a sentence. Maybe I can capture all that. I don’t really know until I start getting it all down.
But then when I, the first 50 pages is agony, absolute agony, setting, the setup is agony and the setup has to be right. And then after the setup, then I can, then I start to outline a little. But very loosely, and as I go on, I get more and more specific. So when I have only 50 pages left, then I have a real list of all the things that, cause you have limited time, I have only 50 pages left, I have to wrap everything up, I have to get everything, where, get everybody where I want them to be.
Then I start outlining. So I outline more and more as the story goes on. But in the beginning, I don’t have an outline at all. Fascinating. But I know, I have it in my head. I don’t really like to take a lot of. I take a lot of notes when I’m researching. But I don’t like to, I just don’t like outlining.
I don’t know, like something about trying to do that kills my vibe. Like I can’t, I keep it in my head and I let it marinate.
[00:29:53] Jane: I have someone else to, it’s so interesting because everyone’s process is different. Alka Joshi was another one. She said she keeps most of it in her head until she gets it down on paper too.
And I’m which I find so impressive, but by both of you, cause I have to get things down on paper. Your
[00:30:07] Lynda: research is really intense. If I was, if my research was as intense as yours. It’s hard.
[00:30:12] Jane: Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. And I read Samantha Woodruff’s book. And she’s coming on in a few weeks, but, and I agree that research was really hard.
Hardcore. Yeah.
[00:30:22] Lynda: Yeah. Great book. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:30:23] Jane: Really good. So your first turn to novels were straight historical fiction. And this one in the matchmakers gift, as you said, incorporates this magical realism. And what made you do the, what made you pivot? And and what’s, been challenging about that? And what’s been like, I love it.
And I love the way you do it. And I think it’s hard to do well. And so what made you pivot to encourage sprinkle some of that sort of aspect to the story?
[00:30:48] Lynda: So I’m a big fantasy reader. I love The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is one of my favorite books of all time. I love the Night Circus.
I love the Gollum and the Ginny. I like I even the dragon books, the fourth wing like I like all these things. I loved The Game of Thrones books, I loved all the Harry Potter books. I love all that stuff. I grew up reading, the magical books were my favorite. Edward Eager’s Half Magic was my favorite book as a child.
[00:31:14] Jane: Oh, very good one.
[00:31:15] Lynda: I always loved that. If I, if you had said to me, do you, did you want to be a writer Not really, but I wanted to be a British person writing children’s books. I wanted to be the female version of Edward Eager. And I used to try to write like a British children’s book, or it wouldn’t have been, it would have been more middle grade or whatever.
And I never could, cause I just never could, but I always loved it. Those are the stories that I love. And then, I actually put a little, It’s funny because people don’t really know this, but I put a little tiny bit of magical realism in the two family house, which people don’t really know because there’s a scene where if people have read that book, I don’t know if I should, it doesn’t really matter what the spoilers, but there’s a night when two babies are born and something happens and a midwife is there and it’s a blizzard and it’s this very fuzzy kind of, I wanted it to be very fuzzy and very hazy and I wanted to, you to not exactly know what happened, what happened.
Like it’s not a secret, you’re supposed to know what has happened with these babies, but I had done the narration of that book with four adult characters and when I got to that scene, I was like, who’s Whose point of view can I tell this from? I can’t tell it from any of the four. The two men are gone, the two women are there.
But I can’t tell it from one of the women’s point of view because it’s too close. And I, and then I’d have to tell it twice. It would, I can’t let one of them have that scene. So I decided I was gonna tell it from the point of view of this 12-year-old girl, the oldest girl, and the midwife sort of relies on her and she’s like the oldest kid and these women are having babies and blah, blah, blah.
But the midwife gives her a lollipop. She’s an unreliable narrator, her name is Judith, and the midwife gives her a lollipop and she falls asleep when the babies are born. So she doesn’t get to see exactly what happens. And when she wakes up, she meets the babies, and she’s told that one is her brother and one is her cousin.
And she loved that lollipop so much, and I say she looks for the wrapper so she can get that lollipop again, and she never finds the lollipop wrapper. And this, the idea in my head was always like, was this like a. A lollipop that put her to sleep on purpose. Like what, but like very few people ever, a few readers have asked me about it, but pretty much no one ever did.
So that was like my little present to myself, like to just little morsel in, but with the matchmakers gift, I knew it was going to be historical and I knew I was going to be exploring, but I knew I was going to be writing historically about a matchmaker, but it just lent itself. I just wanted to make a little magic in there because, You’re talking about a profession I knew she would have this gift and her gift was going to be somewhat magical And I was very nervous about that because I didn’t know if I could write it I didn’t want to be too over the head, you know hitting you over the head with it I wrote the first hundred pages and I gave it to my editor and I was holding my breath to see if she liked it If she thought that it worked and she did so I was like overjoyed over the moon that she felt like it worked but I love that stuff.
I mean I hate I do write historical so I don’t go crazy with it. Like I don’t think I would ever write historical fantasy I don’t think i’m talented enough to do it. Like I think to write fantasy like that world building you have to be
[00:34:35] Jane: Oh, I think you could
[00:34:36] Lynda: I don’t know I feel like you got to be really like off the charts talented And I wouldn’t want to do it badly I would want to do it Like I would want it to be as good as addy larue and I don’t think I have that in me but that you know those You stories.
I just love, I don’t know. It’s fun for me. It’s really fun. I don’t know. I love
[00:34:54] Jane: Daddy in the Mirror too.
[00:34:55] Lynda: I, it was so good. And so I just feel like I don’t ever want to go back. Like I love this kind of thing. I just love it. It’s so good. I don’t know. Be careful. You have to be careful. Like there are, when you put magic in a book, you have to have rules for the magic.
You ask about rules what are my rules for a story? Like for magic, I ha, I always figure out what the rules are.
[00:35:19] Jane: Yeah. Like for the
[00:35:20] Lynda: matchmaker’s gift, she couldn’t match, find a match for her children and she couldn’t find a match for herself. And those were some of the rules.
Because that, so it was like that. You have to find the limits of it.
[00:35:31] Jane: Yeah, that would be cheating, right? Yeah.
[00:35:34] Lynda: Yeah. And in this book, like this, it’s called the love elixir of Augusta Stern, but there is not an actual love potion that makes people fall in love with people. That would be, I’ve said this like a couple of times, but I can’t roofie people in the book, right?
That takes away freewill. That’s cheating. You can’t, it’s not going to be an actual love potion. It’s an elixir that does something else. And something else is different. It’s, and it’s not as far fetched and it’s not a, it’s just, people will see when they read it.
I don’t want to give it away, but it’s something else and it’s, and it had to be something that was fair. But at the same time, it’s dangerous. And when Esther makes this elixir, she says, If you ever give this to somebody, you have to tell them that you’re giving it to them. You have to be honest with them.
If you’re, if they’re going to take it. You can’t just, Give it to somebody without their consent.
So she has her rules, Esther has her rules for it. And Augusta doesn’t necessarily follow the rules, so that’s not good.
[00:36:38] Jane: I want to talk too, I I love talking covers. And I loved this one.
I didn’t even really notice till today that there’s a little like wisp of smoke. Yeah. Yeah, I’ll hold it up better. Sorry. Bye. Bye. Bye. I don’t even know if you can see it in the light, but did you have a,
[00:36:53] Lynda: yeah,
[00:36:53] Jane: there we go. Oh, there we go. I can get it now. Did you have a say in the cover? I love it.
It’s, it just fits, suits the story so well.
[00:37:01] Lynda: Yeah. So I did have a little bit of a say, not, I think probably all of your listeners have heard people talk about covers, so they know we don’t have as much power as, They, people might think we have but with the matchmaker’s gift.
I love that cover so much But it was very whimsical which I loved everything about it But here’s the thing with covers and you know this because you’ve had covers like a cover sets an expectation for a story And there’s a lot that a cover can do. And what I found with the matchmaker’s gift, which made me sad, was that like, I got a lot of new readers because they were younger readers because there’s a young, one of the characters, one of the timelines follows Abby and she’s 25 years old.
So I did develop a lot of younger readers. But I feel like I lost some of my historical readers with that book because of that cover and title And it sounded like an awful lot like a romance book, you know The matchmaker’s gift and I think the combination of the title with the cover Maybe lost it definitely lost me like spots on those like history lists Like it wasn’t on any like historical fiction coming like it was on none of them And I was so sad because I felt like people weren’t gonna find it and they didn’t think it was historical So I was very cognizant of that You When it came time for this cover, and I said to them like many times like I really want to make sure that our next cover says historical, so when the time came for the cover, they gave me two choices at first, and one was very similar to matchmakers gift.
It was very whimsical with lots of little elements on it. And then the other was this basically this one. Though, It, the plants were weird and the mortar and pestle was white and yeah. And so I said, very specifically I love this. It’s the text makes it seem much more rich and it may seem historical.
I think you feel historical from that cover. But can we please change some of this plant matter? So I was like sending drawings of like, I don’t know where I found them online, but like hand drawings of Cinnamon and different things, like things that were, and like the, just the sorts of plants that they would have used because the stuff that they had originally was just like weird plant stuff.
And then the mortar and pestle, I really wanted them when it was white, you can see it’s a largely cream cover. It just didn’t, it needed some oomph. It didn’t have no color. And so first I said, could we make the background like green instead? Can we do something? And they didn’t like that. And then I said could we, let’s try making, can we make the mortar and pestle brass, a brass color?
Because that’s. That’s what hers is. So that they agreed to, because I think, I’m sure you find this too when the cover designer, and it happens, cover designers will put clothes on for the 1950s when the book is set in the 20s. Like sometimes things just get lost, you don’t really, I had a book set in the 40s and they gave them 1960s clothes.
So even though we don’t have so much power necessarily over our covers, when we say that, when we tell them that this is historically inaccurate, they will always. And it’s, make it, make a change, make it right. Yeah. But when I said can you please make the mortar and pestle of the same material that the mortar and pestle is in the book, then they got excited about that.
And they said, yes. And then my editor got excited right away. She was like, maybe we can make it shiny. Maybe it can be foil or whatever. So right
[00:40:13] Jane: away
[00:40:15] Lynda: she was excited about that. Yeah.
[00:40:17] Jane: Yeah. No. Love it. Yeah. That’s
[00:40:18] Lynda: How it came. Yeah. That’s how it needed to be.
[00:40:20] Jane: Couple more questions because I know this is your launch week and you’re like crazed.
I know that we always have aspiring authors in the audience and you’ve been at this for a while now. What’s the best advice you can give?
[00:40:33] Lynda: Oh boy, you have to keep writing. Even when you’re not writing, you have to be writing in your head. I have not written for a long time now.
I’m really struggling with my next story, but I do try to write every day. Even if it’s just a sentence, even if it’s just a word, I go I touch the story in some way every day, even though I’m not getting much of anything done with it. And even though, like you said, it’s launch week and there’s a lot going on, but I still, even if it just means that when I go to sleep at night, I’m still writing.
I turn over and I think about the story. I do that every day. So I think it’s important to be in your story, to not let go of it. It’s losing that memory, losing that muscle memory kind of the story isn’t good. Then you have to catch yourself back up again. And then I would say also like really find a community.
That’s just, so important. Like I’m so grateful that I met you however many years ago was that I met you, because You need to have people that you can talk to about all this stuff. Publishing is a notoriously opaque business, and there’s a lot of information and that’s not necessarily anybody’s fault.
It’s just, it’s a very strange business. Nobody really knows what works to sell books. Nobody really knows how it goes. And, And there are no guarantees and no promises, and it’s not merit based, so there’s so many weird things that happen, and I think it’s just so easy to feel alone, and I need to have people who are going through what you’re going through.
Yeah. Because those are the people, my people help get me out of all my funks and all my bad, feeling bad and. It’s important. Yeah,
[00:42:06] Jane: that is it’s so important. So important because it’s a crazy business that we’re in. Couple last questions. How can readers best keep in touch with you?
And do you zoom with book clubs?
[00:42:17] Lynda: I definitely do book clubs 100%. I love to do that. And I am most active these days on Instagram. I’m still on Facebook, but I’m not as great about doing that. So Instagram, I’m Elle Loikman. First initial, last name, and then my website is my full name, LyndaCohenLeugman.
com. I have to put up my November events. I’ve got all the October events up there, but I have to put up the November and December events which I will do, but I do have a little graphic on my Instagram that lists all the events for November, December 2. You just have to swipe. There are a lot in October, so then November, December is on another slide.
So if you swipe, you’ll see that. And if you want to email me, you can always email me. I’m at. Linda Cohen Loidman at gmail. com. Yeah, I don’t know. I do love, I love zooming with book clubs. It’s really fun.
[00:43:05] Jane: Excellent. Again, I know you’re crazed this week. I’m so glad you took the time. Thank you for taking the time to be on and chat with me.
I miss you. I hope we can have dinner soon.
[00:43:14] Lynda: I know. I hope so too. I know I’m going to be in Boston toward the end of the month, so hopefully I’ll get to see you.
[00:43:18] Jane: Excellent. I wish you so much. I hope this book just soars. I wish you so much success. Thank you. The love elixir of Augusta Stern. I have many historical happy hours coming up this month, and all the registrations are on the website.
Emily Bleecker is next week. She’s another Lake Union author like me. Thank you everyone for tuning in tonight. Linda, you’re the best. I’m, this was just, yes,
[00:43:38] Lynda: you’re the best. You and thank you everybody for coming and listening and watching. I really, yeah.
[00:43:42] Jane: Thank you. Thank you. All right. I’ll be in touch soon.
All right. Okay. Bye.
